


Watching Charlie

by AngiePen



Series: Loving Charlie [2]
Category: Numb3rs
Genre: Action/Adventure, Charlie Whump, Drama, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Ian Whump, M/M, Protective Ian, romantic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2015-08-06
Packaged: 2018-04-09 23:02:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 20
Words: 51,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4367636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngiePen/pseuds/AngiePen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All Charlie wants to do is get back to normal after the kidnapping and... stuff. Ian's hovering, which isn't exactly a bad thing, but his family's driving him nuts. Then some anonymous idiot starts playing pranks, the world goes insane, and Charlie's ready to murder <i>everyone.</i></p><p>Ian gets how annoying it is when people treat you like glass when the danger's over with. He's trying to give Charlie some space, and buffer him from his over-protective family as much as he can. But the pranks really aren't funny, assuming they're actually pranks. Then the tense situation turns explosive, and he's determined to protect Charlie no matter what.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> And we're back. :) This is a short novel, complete, twice as long as the first story. I'll be posting a chapter every morning for the next twenty days. Enjoy!

**Ian**

It wasn't unreasonable that Charlie's family would close around him after what happened. It was exactly how Ian felt, and he couldn't blame the brother and the father for wanting to do the same thing. He got the impression he was the only one who wasn't seeing Charlie as a seven-year-old, though, and by the end of the weekend, Ian could tell that Charlie was ready to blow a gasket at all the fussing and hovering and "How are you feeling?" he was getting.

Charlie'd been clingy since they found him in the motel room, and Ian was fine with just being there and giving Charlie something to hang on to. He had to admit it felt good to have Charlie think of him as something safe, something he _wanted_ to cling to. Ian wasn't usually into clingy lovers, but the circumstances were kind of radical and all things considered, he was enjoying being clung to. He wouldn't have been surprised if Charlie'd decided he didn't want to be touched, at all, by anyone, so a clingy Charlie wasn't something he was going to complain about.

Hovering family was different. Whenever Charlie's dad asked if there was something he could do, something he could get, Ian could feel Charlie tense. And when they came downstairs Tuesday morning to find Don sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, Charlie stopped dead. For a second Ian thought he'd turn right around and go back up to his room.

Ian definitely remembered being told that Don had his own place, that he usually stopped by for dinner three or four times a week, or to watch a game with whoever was around. Being around before breakfast hadn't been mentioned, but there he was.

Charlie finally let out a breath and kept going. He passed Don with a terse "Morning" and went into the kitchen. Ian followed, close enough for their arms to be brushing, within reach if Charlie needed... well, anything. He knew better than to force anything, though, which was apparently more than Don knew.

Ian could feel Don's eyes boring into his back as he walked by. That wasn't helping either.

So when Charlie said, while watching the coffee stream slowly into the pot, "I think I want to go back to campus today," Ian wasn't completely surprised.

"Sure," he said, walking up behind Charlie and looping his arms around him, hands flat on his belly, one over the other. "Want company?"

Charlie nodded without looking away from the coffee.

"I've been wanting to watch you teach," Ian said, his voice low enough not to carry beyond the homey kitchen. "You're great at explaining things to those of us who never got beyond basic calculus. I love listening to your voice when you light up over some math thing. I'll bet you radiate enthusiasm when you're talking to people who can actually understand all the esoterica."

Charlie sent him a small smile over his shoulder. "I like talking to anyone who's interested. And if someone doesn't think they're interested, I like having a chance to change their mind."

"Enthusiasm is catching," said Ian. "And attractive. And sexy. Even if I only understand every fifth word."

"Huh. That just means I have to work harder at explaining."

"I'll listen to whatever you want to explain, Professor. If you want to go to school today and do it there, that works for me."

"Wait, who's going to school today?" And suddenly Don was there in the kitchen doorway. "Hey, buddy, don't you think it's a little soon? No one expects you back until, what, next week?"

Ian felt Charlie stiffen up. He said, "I want to go," his voice tight. "I'm not used to staying inside the same walls all day, every day. I need to get out."

"You've stayed in for days -- weeks -- when you were working on something," Don pointed out, completely missing the point. Or maybe not missing it, but hoping to bury it.

"I'm not working on anything right now," said Charlie, slow and patient, still watching the coffee fill the pot. "I'm not sick. I'm not injured. I want to go out. There's no reason why I can't go onto campus, or even teach my classes."

"Hey, that's fine, if you're sure. I just don't want you thinking you have to push yourself before you're ready, you know?"

"I'm ready if I say I'm ready." Charlie yanked the pot off the finally-finished coffee maker and poured two mugs, only splashing a little.

"Sure, sure, that's fine, buddy, just saying."

Charlie took his mug and practically stomped past Don and out the door. Ian stayed, leaning against the counter with his own mug. He just looked at Don with a sideways smirk, waiting.

Sure enough. "You look out for him," Don said. As if he had to.

"Of course."

"If it gets to be, you know, too much, then make him come home."

"I'll make sure he gets what he needs."

Don obviously knew that wasn't quite agreement, and he glared hard.

Ian just stared back. "Being smothered in bubble wrap is stressing him out. We'll try the school. If that doesn't work, I'll drag him out for a walk or something, someplace quiet, where there's no one fussing over him and asking him over and over whether he's all right."

"It just means we care about him," said Don, a snarly edge in his voice.

"I know that. So does Charlie. Doesn't stop it from pissing him off. Come on, Eppes, seriously? If you're sick or hurt, how growly do _you_ get when Charlie and your dad fuss at you?"

"They don't--" He stopped, scowled.

"Right, they don't fuss at you. I'll bet you react really badly to it. News flash -- so does Charlie."

Don slumped against one side of the doorway, rubbing his forehead with one hand. "This is different. It's not like getting beat up, or even shot."

"You're right, it is. Doesn't change how tense Charlie's been, though. He needs to get away. I'll be with him."

"You look out for him," Don repeated.

Ian just said, "On it," and left, heading upstairs to Charlie's room.

They spent most of the morning in Charlie's office at CalSci with the door just cracked open. A few people came in to say hi, a couple of students tapped hesitantly and asked if they could ask just one question, so sorry they hadn't waited for office hours, but they needed this one thing....

Charlie started out tense, startling easily, and clearly (to Ian, anyway) hypervigilant, his eyes sweeping the windows every few seconds, and looking up whenever footsteps approached or passed by the door. Eventually he loosened up some, and by the time a dozen grad students filed in for a seminar that was apparently held in Charlie's office, he was looking a lot like his old self, smiling and bouncy.

Ian pulled a chair over next to the door, where he had a good view of the room and anyone in it, and was right there if anyone came in. Not that he was expecting anything, but Charlie wasn't the only one feeling hypervigilant. His boyfriend had been kidnapped at gunpoint right out of that very room, and while Ian knew it wasn't going to happen again -- that the person who did it was in jail -- he still wanted to keep watch, and it didn't hurt anything.

While keeping a security-oriented eye on the room and all its possible entrances, he also watched Charlie. He hadn't been bullshitting -- he loved listening to Charlie talk about math, for the joyful enthusiasm he radiated like sunshine. He loved watching him happily buried in his element, even if he didn't understand what the hell he was talking about, which was good, because he didn't understand what the hell _any_ of them were talking about throughout the whole class.

He did notice that none of the students glowed with math the way Charlie did. Was it the genius for math that made him glow, or was it the glow -- the enthusiasm for the subject -- that made him a genius at it?

Ian didn't know. Whatever the cause, he loved watching it, and would be happy to play private security for as long as Charlie needed.

Actually, that was something to fantasize about, wasn't it? He imagined casting himself and Charlie into the roles in The Bodyguard. It was fun to think about, and it would've been a lot easier on everyone if he could've just taken a bullet for Charlie, instead of having to rescue him from his personal whack job.

Just the thought was enough to bring him down from his fantasy-musing. Yeah, that bullet would've definitely been easier on everyone.

When the seminar was over and the last students finally finished talking about whatever it was they were doing and trickled away, Charlie got a visit from his boss. She was a large woman with a personality to match; Ian finally had some idea of how Charlie ended up going to all those fund-raising events he hated.

Considering what'd come of the last one, Ian wasn't disposed to like Millie very much. She swept Charlie up in a hug and apologized over and over, though, promising more thorough checking of invitations at the door in the future, and Ian decided she was allowed to stay Charlie's boss.

Not that anyone cared what he thought, but at least he didn't have to try to come up with some way to get her removed.

And seriously, even he had to admit it wasn't reasonable to expect a psycho-rapist-kidnapper to show up at a university fund raiser in an evening dress and start stalking math professors. Just like grocery stores didn't have barbed wire fences around them and you didn't have to pass through a metal detector to get into the Walmart, it wasn't unreasonable to have lax security at a university party.

Which didn't make Ian _like_ it, but he couldn't secure every single place Charlie went like it was Airforce One.

Finally Millie said, "And who is this?" turning a smile and an outstretched hand toward Ian.

"This is Ian Edgerton," Charlie said, while the two of them shook hands. "He's with the FBI."

"They still have someone tailing you?" asked Millie. "Is there still a threat? I thought that woman was working alone?"

"So far as we know, she was," said Charlie, with a glance up at Ian.

"I've known Charlie for a while," said Ian. "I have some vacation time, so I thought I'd hang out with him until work starts up again."

"Well, good," said Millie. "I know the feeling -- when I heard what'd happened, I wanted to run to the hospital myself and stand guard. I feel terrible about it, considering where it started." Charlie got another big hug, which he handled with a smile that almost looked sincere. "You keep a good eye on him, Mr. Edgerton."

"I'll do that, ma'am." It was hard not to like her, actually. She reminded him of a teacher he'd had in high school -- agressive and energetic, but always focused on what was best for her kids.

"You just ease back into work," she said to Charlie. "If you get tired, or need some more time off, just let the office know and we'll handle it."

"I'm fine, Millie, really."

Charlie looked like he was about to start ranting again, so Ian said, "Well, I need some lunch. Come on, Charlie, show me what's good to eat around here."

Millie beamed at Ian. "Excellent idea. You two run along. Good to meet you, Mr. Edgerton!"

Ian said, "You too," and steered Charlie out of the office and down the corridor toward the closest exit.

Once they made it outside into the fresh air, Charlie relaxed a little. Ian slowed down and they walked to the car at a more normal pace. Charlie got waves and greetings from students here and there on the way, and by the time they were in the car and headed off campus, he seemed to be back to almost normal.

Charlie stopped at a red light and turned an apologetic smile on Ian. "Sorry. I usually handle... I don't know, _stuff,_ better than that. It's like everyone's extra annoying these days."

"Not a problem," said Ian. "I don't like to be fussed over when I've been hurt either. Slap on a bandage and let me get back to work -- the doctors hate me."

Charlie laughed, which had been Ian's goal.

"Do you have to go back after lunch?" Ian asked. "If not, I was thinking we could go take a walk somewhere -- maybe not the weekend hike we had planned, but something close?"

Charlie glared at him for the couple of seconds before the light turned green, then looked away and said, "Are you trying to get me to slow down too? Because I can go right back to 'annoyed' if I have to."

"Actually, I'd like to get you somewhere alone where I could get your heart rate up for a while. If you want to take it slow, though, I could probably handle it."

Charlie laughed again -- score! He said, "Sure, that sounds like a great idea. I don't have another class today. I have some exams to grade, but Millie can get the TAs to do that. How about if we get some sandwiches and stuff, and go for a shorter hike?"

"Sounds like a plan, so long as I can get you behind a tree for at least part of it."

"We'll see what the trails look like." His right hand strayed over to Ian's thigh and rubbed up and down, not high enough to make that isolated tree urgent, but it felt good anyway. And Charlie was feeling better, so mission accomplished. The next goal was to keep the good, relaxed mood going for as long as possible.

Charlie pulled in at a supermarket that had a deli counter where they made sandwiches. He had Ian stand in line to put their order in while he ran around the store collecting chips, apples, sodas and brownies. Luckily he had a backpack stashed in his car, because hiking up a trail with a couple of heavy grocery bags dangling from your hands isn't a lot of fun after the first ten minutes or so.

The park Charlie took him to was close enough for an afternoon trip, which meant they never did find a tree quite isolated enough. They did find a nice spot about an hour up a side trail that didn't get too much traffic, though. The grass was sun-dried into a pale wheat color, usual for California except for a short stretch of time during the spring rainy season. Twisty oaks spread their branches over bare or nearly bare ground; the tannic acid of the oak trees killed off pretty nearly anything else that might try to grow within the circle of their crowns and root systems. This made for a nice clear area to sit and eat, if you weren't too fussy about wanting soft grass to sit on.

Birds rustled around in the shrubs near the trail, and Ian spotted a grey squirrel with a fuzzy tail glaring down at them from high up in their oak. The cloud-streaked blue sky was visible in bits and patches through the spreading, leafy branches, and they were high enough up out of the valley that the air smelled fresh.

Getting naked wasn't in the picture -- and Ian had been joking about that anyway, 'cause for actual outdoor sex you needed to be a lot farther out, which was a plan for later in his visit -- but their spot was good for some fooling around. They only got a couple of whistles and one round of applause.

Charlie tasted like apples and brownies, which was a surprisingly good combination. Ian had never been a major chocolate fan, even as a kid, but maybe there was something to the whole chocolate thing after all, if Charlie'd been eating it.

They got to a point where getting up and moving on was a good idea, since getting arrested for indecent exposure or lewd conduct wasn't on their agenda. While they walked, Ian encouraged Charlie to talk. He'd enjoyed hiking since before Ian knew him, and he talked about hiking the parks around the LA area with his parents and brother when he was a kid. His mother'd been concerned that he was spending all his time hidden away in his room with pencil and paper, blackboard and computer, and insisted on dragging him out to get some air and exercise. He wasn't into the more usual sports like Don was, but he liked hiking -- walking, covering ground, seeing new things as they went.

Talking about his mom and some good times he remembered having with her kept Charlie relaxed and smiling. Ian liked seeing him that way, happy and enthused about life. It was something he'd lost for a while, and Ian was happy to see he was getting it back.

They looped around and ended up back at the car a little after six. Ian was hungry again, but Charlie insisted on stopping back at CalSci to get his laptop bag. He'd left it in the office when Ian hustled him out to get him away from Millie, and he wanted to take it home with him.

Ian understood about stuff you just liked to have near you -- he had a pistol strapped to his ankle under the hem of his jeans, even though his rifle and his other gear was in Charlie's room back at the house -- so he just teased Charlie a little about his electronic security blanket, but didn't gripe much about the detour.

He followed Charlie into the building and down the hall to his office. Charlie opened the door while talking about some kind of whatsi-nomial equation sort of thing, and as the door opened, Ian heard paper tearing.

Charlie stopped, then reached out and tore a piece of paper off the door. The other half was taped to the doorframe; it'd torn when he pushed the door open. He put the two pieces together, and Ian saw printed on them the word BANG! in six-inch letters.


	2. Chapter 2

**Charlie**

Charlie sat behind his desk with his arms crossed, glaring at the clot of people crowding his office. He thought they were all being idiots, and he was determined to just sit there and let them do their idioting until they got tired of it and came to their senses.

Obviously a piece of paper that said "BANG!" was a joke. They were in the middle of a university campus. Students played jokes all the time. It might not be one of the regular seasons for organized pranking, but minor pranks happened regularly, and a piece of paper saying "BANG!" was about as minor as a prank got. He wasn't wet, or itching, or covered in flour or chalk dust. None of his possessions had been harmed or moved or taken. It was the mildest prank he'd ever _heard_ of since first setting foot onto a college campus at the age of thirteen, and Don and Ian -- _Ian,_ who'd been his stable anchor through this whole awful period of suck -- were treating it like someone had sent a death threat to the president written in blood.

The whole team had shown up twenty minutes after Ian called Don, something Charlie hadn't been able to prevent, no matter how hard or how loudly he argued. A tech was dusting for fingerprints -- and was going to find at least forty sets, that being approximately how many students and faculty had been through his office since the last time he'd let a janitor give the place a good cleaning.

Actually, depending on how you defined "good" cleaning, it might be longer than that, so up the estimate to a couple of hundred.

They were taking photos and measurements, questioning everyone unlucky enough to set foot in the building while they were there, and Ian and Don were discussing what kind of knowledge and equipment someone would need to have set the "trap" and then exit the room with the door blocked.

Charlie had pointed out that any moderately competent engineering student could've removed the screen and the window slider, gone through, and replaced them. And most of the non-engineering students could probably have done it too, because it wasn't _that_ complicated.

They had someone outside in the bushes taking footprint castings from the dirt below each of Charlie's office windows. Were they going to have every student on campus line up and give shoe impressions? That'd take days, even if they could find everyone, because some students only came on campus once or twice a week, depending on how they'd layed out their schedules, and there were staff who did the same, and they'd be digging people out of labs all over the property because some of those folks weren't even sure who the president of the US was, forget being up on mild campus gossip.

It was insane. What, were they afraid someone was planning to terrorize him with paper cuts?

Charlie looked at his watch and stood up. Don and Ian cut off whatever they'd been discussing and looked at him.

"It's almost eight. I'm going home. I'll probably stop and get some food on the way; anyone who wants to come with me is welcome, but this is ridiculous and I'm not staying here any longer." He picked up his computer bag, slung the strap over his head and made for the door.

Don and Ian exchanged glances, and Ian fell into step behind him. Fine.

They went back out to the car. Charlie put his bag in the back and got in, Ian sliding in next to him.

"What do you feel like eating?" he asked, keeping his voice as normal as possible. Because if Ian tried to lecture him right then, he'd... well, there wasn't much he _could_ do to Ian if Ian didn't want to let him, but he could get out of the car and walk somewhere. Although Ian would follow him. Nobody would ever leave him alone again so long as they were convinced that some evil villain who had a laser printer and wasn't afraid to use it was after him.

"How about pizza? I'll admit I'm pretty hungry -- I could use the calories."

"That works." There, see? They could have a normal conversation.

Charlie pulled out of his space and tried to decide which place to go to. "You prefer thin crust or thick?"

"I'm good with either," Ian said. "So long as there's a lot of meat on it."

"We could get one of each," Charlie said. He pulled out of the lot and turned north, thinking of a pizza place a couple miles away. "I know a place--" And right then he was interrupted by a series of light bangs coming out of the engine.

He slammed on the brakes, triggering horns and yelling all around him, but when no flames or even smoke appeared, he pulled over to the side and shut off the car.

"Out," said Ian. "Move away, back there to the fence." He pointed at a fence on the other side of the planting strip and sidewalk. Charlie grabbed his computer bag, just in case something did happen, and trotted over to the indicated spot.

He was _not_ spooked. Nothing had happened, it was just a noise. Probably something with the engine, a loud knocking or something. That happened, didn't it?

Ian waited until he was away, then went around to the driver's side, ducked down and reached in to trigger the hood release.

The hood popped open, just a few inches, and nothing else happened.

Charlie watched, wondering what to do next, looking back and forth between the open hood and what he could see of the top of Ian's head through the car window.

After a minute, Ian duck-walked up to the near edge of the hood and levered it open, slowly.

Nothing happened.

He stood up and looked inside, then scowled and pulled a dirty white piece of paper out. He held it, staring, and pulled his phone out.

Damn.

Charlie walked back to the car, ready to tell Ian to shut the hell up if he protested. Ian gave him a hard stare, but didn't say anything. He held the paper out so Charlie could see that it said BANG!

"What was the noise?"

Ian said, "Don, we've got another one. His car this time," while pointing down, toward the engine.

Charlie looked and saw a strip of caps, the kind you could buy for toy cap guns, coiled around the engine block. It'd heated up and set them off, making noise and nothing else.

The sign, like the one in his office, and the caps to draw attention, because otherwise he wouldn't have popped the hood of his car for weeks, probably.

Another prank. And of course, Don and the team were going to come screaming up and treat his car like a crime scene.

Charlie groaned, turned and leaned against his car, arms crossed over his stomach and his head back to stare at the sky.

He wasn't afraid, because this was just a particularly creative, minimalist prankster. But he was pissed off because it was going to wreck his life until the prankster was caught; his beloved brother and... well, beloved Ian would see to that.

He straightened up and called, "I'm going for pizza. Tell Don I'll be at Vince's -- he knows where it is," then he set off down the sidewalk.

Of course, before he'd gone half a dozen steps, Ian's hand closed on his arm. "Charlie, you can't just take off by yourself."

"Watch me." He glared up at his way-too-protective boyfriend. "This is ridiculous. It's a prank. Nothing this person did was designed to hurt me, or even really scare me. It's stupid, I'm hungry, and I'm going for pizza. It's just a couple miles up the road. When you're done here, you can come down and eat."

"Charlie, this is serious. Someone's playing with you right now, but it could turn deadly at any time."

"They're pranks. Students play pranks. It's really bad timing, yes, but that's not common knowledge. Someone thinks they're being funny, and if it weren't for... for everything else, I'd think it was funny too. I'm not going to curl up and hide because someone has access to a laser printer and a roll of toy caps."

"Charlie...." Ian huffed out a breath, glaring, obviously trying to figure out how to convince Charlie that this was an incredibly dangerous situation. Ian was a smart guy, though, and he figured out almost immediately that he wasn't going to be able to do that, so instead he said, "Hang on." He held the phone up to his ear again and said, "Don? Right, Charlie and I are going for pizza." He paused a second, then said, "No, really. Charlie says we'll be at Vince's. You can come check out the car, then... call us. Charlie says if we're still there when you're done, you can come eat with us."

Charlie could hear his brother's voice, although he couldn't make out the words. He smirked, imagining what he was saying. Don took this stuff way too seriously. Or, all right, usually not, but that was the problem -- he was so used to chasing bad guys, people who'd murder for money or to silence witnesses or for whatever reason, he assumed every situation was like that. He had a hammer, and he assumed every problem was a nail.

Ian wrapped up with Don and put his phone away, then put the piece of paper back onto the engine and closed the hood. He closed the door, then trotted back to Charlie. They started off again down the sidewalk.

"I guess the car will be safe enough," Charlie said. "I usually lock it, but Don doesn't have a key."

"Hey, if your car's not safe on a busy street with the FBI three minutes away, where _is_ it safe?"

Charlie grinned at Ian and leaned over to bump his shoulder. At least Ian knew when not to keep pushing.

While they walked to the pizza place, the streetlights flickered on and the sky darkened. Charlie was aware of Ian watching all around them every step of the way, but he wasn't obvious about it and Charlie knew that was just normal Ian behavior -- actually, normal law enforcement type behavior, and probably soldiers too -- so he ignored it and pointed out the flow of traffic, cars and buses and trucks and pedestrians and bicycles, and talked about how the city was like a living organism, with its streets and pipes and wires and tunnels like the vessels and tracts and neural pathways of a body, and how it all followed a predictable rhythm, even if individual people travelled at different times or to different destinations, or someone washed their car off schedule, or spent an unexpected hour on the phone. It was a fascinating model and Charlie loved talking about models. Ian seemed to enjoy hearing about it, asking questions every now and then, so that occupied them for the two mile walk to the restaurant.

Ian staked out a booth in the corner while Charlie ordered a carnivore special. He made his way over to the table with a pitcher of soda and two glasses; Don could get his own, when and if he showed up.

Charlie slid into the booth, all the way around until he was in the corner. Ian always waited to sit on the end, probably so he could dive right out and tackle anyone who made a threatening move. Don was the same. In fact, the whole team was like that. Maneuvering for seats at a restaurant with four FBI agents was a complex exercise, and when Charlie was out with the group and they approached a table, he'd gotten used to just automatically taking the chair with its back to the door.

Booths presented a different problem, since the tables were usually bolted down and presented a barrier to quick egress. Charlie'd thought about working out an expression to describe the trade-offs between sitting to one side, with an imperfect view versus having an optimal view but being pinned in place, especially if there were people sitting to either side.

Charlie was pretty sure Ian had never thought of working it out mathematically, but his intuition had him choosing the seat to the side, and he wanted Charlie next to him, which put him in the optimal viewing position, but pinned down. Charlie figured that if anything violent happened, he'd be ducking under the table anyway, so that worked for him.

When Charlie settled down, Ian looped an arm around his shoulders and said, "At least we had half a good day, right? Or maybe two-thirds. That's something."

Charlie leaned in and said, "Two-thirds, definitely. It was good getting back in with the students."

"It was good watching," Ian said, "even if I had no idea what you were talking about most of the time."

Ian was always saying that -- that he liked listening to Charlie talk about math, even when he didn't get it -- but Charlie had to wonder. He hated having conversations go over his head. If it sounded even vaguely interesting, he wanted to dive in and learn about it so he'd understand, and if it didn't then why would he want to listen? He'd learned to listen to a lot of boring conversations just to be polite; that was basic social skills. It didn't mean he enjoyed it, though. And Ian reassured him about it so often that Charlie had to wonder whether it was true. Was he really boring the heck out of him, and Ian was just being polite because Charlie didn't have much else to talk about?

"What do you do when you're not working?" he asked. Because they'd talked about other things, sure, sports and politics, sometimes movies, whatever thing everyone else was talking about at any given moment, but he didn't know what Ian did when he had a chunk of time and could choose how to spend it. That struck him as a pretty huge gap for a guy he was in love with.

"What most people do, I suppose," said Ian. "Relax, do laundry, read, watch TV. I can't follow TV shows regularly, so I have a Netflix account. I can log in wherever I am and get back to whatever show I was watching."

"Really? What are you watching?" Charlie hadn't thought of Ian as much of a TV person. He wasn't himself, so that wasn't the first thing he thought about. He had to admit he thought of people who watched a lot of TV as kind of boring, but Ian wasn't, so he clearly had to revisit that concept.

"I've been watching Eureka recently." Ian looked away and took a slug of soda, like he was embarassed. "It's completely out there, but it's a fun show. The new sheriff in town discovers all this sci-fi stuff going on. Something to relax with, you know?"

"Sure, that makes sense." Charlie nodded, his cheek rubbing Ian's shoulder. "Your job is so intense, wanting to just kick back and turn off all the... what did you call it, the hypervigilance?" He grinned at Ian's mock-scowl. "Do you read SFish stuff, too?"

"Sometimes," he said. "Mostly I like non-fiction when I'm reading. I've got Aldrin's memoir in my pack right now -- he talks about going to the moon, but also the stuff that came after. It's a good book."

"I'll bet," said Charlie, trying hard not to look surprised. "I remember my dad talking about watching the moon landing on TV. Back then, it was this huge, incredible thing, and everyone wanted to watch. Now you have to find some specialty channel at a weird time if you want to watch spaceships take off."

"There's only one first trip to the moon," Ian pointed out.

"True, and you can graph the loss of interest as something that was new and singular becomes common and mundane. But still, I wish I'd been around to see that first launch."

"I'm glad you weren't," said Ian with a grin. "I'd rather wait a while before I have to deal with you all grey and wrinkly."

Charlie laughed. "Okay, there's that. You'll get wrinkly before I do, though, so don't snark too much."

"Never," said Ian. "I'm looking forward to watching you get grey and wrinkly. Very slowly, over many years."

That pretty much required a kiss, so Charlie leaned up and gave him one. If anyone in the restaurant didn't like it, they could take a number to complain.


	3. Chapter 3

**Ian**

Don never showed up at the pizza place, and Ian was fine with that.

He didn't have any brothers or sisters himself, but he'd had plenty of opportunity to observe how siblings got under each others' skin. Growing up with someone meant you knew every weak place, every sensitive subject, all the exact words that made your brother or sister blow their stack or implode with shame or... well, pretty much whatever reaction you were looking for.

Or even reactions you weren't looking for. Old habits and deep ruts led siblings down paths that were unproductive, to say the least, just because they were used to going there.

Don was used to looking out for his baby brother, and there was a thread of annoyance in there at the same time that prevented him from seeing how mad he made Charlie when he did it. Or he saw but didn't care -- maybe having Charlie whining at him just felt normal? Whatever it was, they didn't need it that night.

Not that Ian didn't get where Don was coming from. He wanted to scoop Charlie up and take him camping in the Rockies, or the Appalachians, or maybe the Himalayas -- far away from whoever it was who'd booby-trapped his car and his office. He knew better than to think he could get away with it, though. But then, he'd met Charlie as a grown man, and had never changed his diapers.

Of course, the big brown eyes and dark curls didn't help. Charlie wasn't exactly a macho, butch kind of guy. Which was fine -- Ian was into cute. But still, Ian didn't get any kid-vibes off of Charlie, and it was blindingly obvious that Don still saw Charlie as an annoying little kid.

A text message from Don let them know that Charlie's car had been towed to the FBI evidence garage where the techs would be going over it with tweezers and Q-tips. Charlie ranted about that while Ian called them a cab.

They picked up Ian's rental -- from the FBI garage, and without going upstairs so Charlie could yell at Don, which had taken some doing on Ian's part -- and drove back to Charlie's place.

Ian parked in front of the house. Charlie looked at the car in the driveway and said, "Dad's home." He didn't sound too happy about it.

"That a problem?" Ian asked. "We can go somewhere else if you want."

Charlie stayed silent for a few, like he was thinking about it, then shook his head. "No. If Don called him so Dad could nag at me too, it's going to happen, now or later. I'd rather get it over with."

Ian nodded, pulled his duffle out of the trunk and followed Charlie into the house. Mr. Eppes was sitting in the living room reading a paper; he looked up when they came in.

"Hey, Charlie. Ian. Have a good day?"

Charlie gave him a sharp look, then shrugged and said, "Mostly. Some student's pulling pranks at school, and Don's decided I'm being stalked by an assassin."

"Pranks? What kind of pranks?" his father asked. Ian could see tension in his hands where they tightened down on the edges of his newspaper, but he was obviously trying not to let Charlie see his stress. Smart guy.

"Pranks involving paper. With printing on it. And a strip of caps, like the ones I had for my cap gun when I was seven." Charlie wasn't really under-reporting, but he was definitely spinning the story in a nothing-to-see-here direction.

"Huh," said Mr. Eppes. "Doesn't sound terribly creative. When I was in college, we took apart the Dean's Buick and reassembled it on the roof of the gym. It took us four and a half hours, with eight engineering students helping."

"Four and a half hours?" Charlie grinned. "I'll bet eight CalSci students could do it in half that."

"Those old Buicks were heavy!" Mr. Eppes protested. "And we couldn't use a crane or we'd have gotten caught! Have you ever tried to work in sync with seven other guys carrying a drive train up a flight of stairs?"

"No, you've got me on that, Dad." Charlie was still grinning and Ian felt himself relax a little. "Pranks these days tend to be more high tech."

"Like when you hijacked the Hollywood sign?" Mr. Eppes asked. "I have to admit, that would've been way beyond us back in my day."

"It would've been technically impossible back in your day," Charlie pointed out. "You have to love the progress of science."

"True. When your granddad was in college, they snuck onto the USC campus and dressed up a statue of their founder in UCLA colors, and that made the front page of the local papers. In _his_ father's day, they stole the dean's horse and got it up onto the roof of the admin building."

"So you're saying you and your friends were cribbing off your grandfather's prank?" Charlie teased. "I'm disappointed, Dad. I expected some creativity."

"Hey, all they had to do was wave some gingerbread in front of the horse and it climbed the stairs itself. Granddad always said that horse would do anything for gingerbread. We had to get that Buick up to the roof in pieces."

"You have to admit your dad worked a lot harder than his grandfather," Ian said, smirking at both of them. "Sweat labor makes up for creativity in my book."

"I thought the whole point of going to college was to use your brain," Charlie protested.

"Engineering takes both," Mr. Eppes said, sending Charlie a sharp look. "If you want to be able to build something, you have to be able to roll up your sleeves and do the work. I suppose spending your whole career never lifting anything heavier than a piece of chalk has given you some strange ideas."

"Hey, I carry my laptop around too!"

"I stand corrected. You're just lucky some engineers in the past were willing to put up with solder burns so you could have your nice, light laptop."

"And the engineers are lucky some mathematicians came up with formulas to calculate, oh, pretty much everything, so they don't have to build everything through purely trial and error anymore."

Charlie and his dad were smirking at each other, obviously having a great time. Ian was leaning against a shelving unit, looking back and forth across the living room at the two of them, enjoying the show. Mr. Eppes finally declared that if they were going to argue all night, he was going to go make coffee.

The show over, or at least on an intermission, Ian said, "I'm going to go drop my duffle in your room."

"I'll get you some towels," Charlie said, and led the way up the stairs. "I'll clear off a chair and you can put--"

He opened the door and stopped. Ian heard the sound of paper tearing, dropped his duffle and moved Charlie aside by picking him up under the arms and rotating. Charlie yelped, startled, but didn't fight or protest. Ian turned back and saw what he'd expected to find -- a torn piece of paper with BANG! printed on it, hanging in two pieces, one end on Charlie's bedroom door and the other on the doorframe. They were taped to the inside surfaces.

Someone had snuck in, set up the "prank," then left through one of the windows.

"All right," said Charlie, his eyes wide. "Now I'm officially freaking out."

"Good," said Ian. "Call Don, tell him what happened. I'll find out if your father heard anything, or noticed anyone hanging around."

Charlie just nodded and fumbled in his pocket for his phone. Ian reached out and cupped his cheek with one hand. When Charlie looked up, Ian said, "Don't open anything." Charlie nodded again, quick and jerky.

Ian headed downstairs and into the kitchen, where Charlie's father was fiddling with the coffee maker.

"Mr. Eppes?"

"I've told you before, call me Alan. Even when the boys were children, we never really--"

"Mr. Eppes, have you heard anything unusual this evening? Or seen anyone you don't recognize near the house?"

"What? No." He put down the empty carafe and turned around. "Why? What's wrong?"

"Those pranks Charlie told you about? Whoever's 'pranking' Charlie was in the house some time today. They set one of their little traps in his room."

"Someone was--? No, there wasn't... I mean, I didn't--" Alan stopped and scowled. "I had some errands to run this morning, and I had a class at one. Someone could've broken in, and if they were careful, didn't steal anything obvious or leave a mess, I wouldn't have known." He looked up in the direction of Charlie's room, then asked, "What exactly are we talking about? You don't think it's just pranks, do you?"

"So far it's been harmless. No one's been hurt, nothing's been taken or broken that we've noticed. But the implications are disturbing. Whoever it is, they're printing 'BANG!' on pieces of paper, then putting them in places where one might plant a bomb. They're set so that they're discovered the same way a bomb might be set to go off -- opening a door, starting a car."

"Bombs?" Alan looked like he wanted to run upstairs and check on his son, but all that showed was clenched fists and darting eyes. "You think they're meant to be threats?"

"I think that if they're not threats, someone has an incredibly sick sense of humor and is trying to scare Charlie. Don's assuming they're threats, and I agree with him. At least, that's the safest way to proceed."

"No, I can see this isn't the sort of thing you can afford to be wrong about. What do we do?"

"Charlie's finally figured out that it's not just some student playing harmless pranks. He's realized he should be afraid. Under the circumstances, that's good. He hasn't been very happy with me and Don today. Now at least he's likely to cooperate."

"Cooperate with what?" Alan gave him a hard stare.

"I don't know right now." Ian frowned and looked away. "My first impulse is to pack him off somewhere away from here where I can keep him safe. That's not a long-term solution, though. And if whoever it is really does plan to escalate to real explosives, that could leave you vulnerable, or the people at CalSci, if Charlie gets away and they decide to go ahead and take out his office or his home in a temper tantrum."

"Wait, you seriously think they might set a bomb here?" Alan looked around like he thought he might spot a bundle of dynamite under a table or behind a chair.

"I don't know what they'll do," Ian said, keeping his voice neutral. He didn't want to panic Alan, but he needed him to understand that the situation was potentially serious. "They've hinted at it, but we don't know what this is about. If it _is_ just someone joking around, then it's a piss-poor joke and they need to be schooled on their sense of humor with a baseball bat. But we can't assume it's harmless."

"No, it's not sounding very harmless." Alan sank back into a chair, his fists still clenched.

"Charlie's talking to Don," said Ian. "He'll come over with a forensics team, see if they can find prints or something. We need to know who this is. And now that Charlie's taking it seriously, I need to talk to him about who might have a grudge."

Alan let out a weak laugh. "All the work he's been doing with Don over the last few years, there's probably a list."

"Yeah," said Ian with a sigh. "We'll have to start going through their old case files, see who's out of prison, or has associates or family on the outside who might want some revenge on the math geek who put their buddy or brother away."

"Well, you have plenty to do, then," said Alan. "Let me know if I can help with anything."

"Will do." Ian nodded and headed back upstairs.

He found Charlie sitting on the floor in the hall, leaning against the wall, his phone dangling in one hand. "Hey," he said, settling down next to Charlie. "How are you doing?"

"Don's on the way," said Charlie. He looked up at Ian, his eyes big and scared. "This is real, isn't it? Whenever this guy, whoever it is, gets tired of playing with me, the next door I open, or drawer or package or the next time I get in my car, it could be a real bomb."

Ian looped his arms around Charlie and pulled him close. "We're not going to let that happen," he said. He did his best to sound reassuring, but Charlie didn't respond. "We're going to figure out who this is, and we're going to throw their ass in prison, hopefully with a bullet or two in them."

Charlie shivered and burrowed his face into Ian's shoulder. "You wouldn't, right? Not really? I mean, just... shoot someone, just because...?"

Ian tightened his hold for a second. "No. I'd want to, but I wouldn't." He ruffled Charlie's hair and said, "Hey, I had that woman's head in my sights when she was in the middle of raping you." He felt Charlie stiffen up, but just held on and kept going. "Do you have any idea how hard it was not blowing _her_ away? Every part of me wanted to, _needed_ to, except the part that didn't want to be locked away from you for the next twenty-five years."

"So I'm your conscience?"

"I have a conscience of my own. That's the only way I could do this job for so long without going feral, because there are plenty of bastards out there who are begging to be handled the quick and cheap way, for the good of society. But I play by the rules because having those rules is the only reason we _have_ a society." He paused, then went on with, "You're the one person who could make me want to throw away my own conscience. When that woman was hurting you, almost nothing else mattered. You're the only thing that mattered enough to keep me from doing it."

Charlie said, "Okay," and they just sat there on the floor, wrapped up in each other, until Don came slamming through the door downstairs with his team, and it was time to get to work.


	4. Chapter 4

The next afternoon, they all gathered at the FBI offices to get an update on what the team had found so far. Charlie was sitting in Don's chair, while Ian leaned half-sitting against the desk with a hand on Charlie's shoulder.

It was telling that they didn't have enough data to make a briefing board a necessity, or even a convenience.

Sinclair said, "The signs are basic bond paper, available in any office supply store. They came out of a laser printer -- black and white, so there's no tracking. Scotch brand tape, available in a hundred thousand stores within a two hour drive. The toy caps aren't as popular as they were when I was a kid, but there's over a thousand places in LA county where you can buy them. Testing on a couple of unexploded caps showed that the powder was old, so someone's had these for a while -- no chance of calling around and seeing if anyone working at any of those thousand places remembers someone suspicious buying them recently." He looked around and shrugged. "Sorry, basically nothing. If we get a suspect, we can run a page through any black and white laser printers they have access to and try to match artifacts and imperfections, but we need a suspect first."

He looked at Granger, who said, "Whoever did this is sneaky. No clear footprints in the dirt around the house or outside Charlie's office. No fingerprints. Smudges indicated whoever did it was wearing gloves, probably latex rather than work or cold weather gloves. We found a hair in the engine, stuck to the tape holding one side of the sign down, but it was cooked too much to get any DNA off it."

"Can you tell anything about the hair itself?" Don asked. He didn't look too happy so far, and Ian felt the same.

"Short, straight, about an inch and a half long. It probably started out brown." Granger shrugged. "Considering how careful they've been with everything else, and how blatantly the hair was taped down, I'd bet they deliberately planted it just to piss us off. It might or might not even belong to the perp."

"That fits with what I was thinking," said Reeves. "We're dealing with someone who's out for some kind of pay-back, but they're smart, and patient. This isn't like someone who's furious over a grudge and is looking to kill their target right away. This person wants Charlie to realize what's going on, and spend some time being terrified."

"They're going for torture, not just revenge," said Don. He looked like he was ready to shoot someone himself.

"The torture is part of the revenge," Reeves said, correcting him. "Whoever is doing this has it carefully planned, and they'll be drawing it out for a while. They're probably watching Charlie somehow, and they're taking satisfaction from his fear." She gave Charlie an apologetic look, but Charlie was looking down at his hands, clasped on his knees, and didn't notice. Ian squeezed his shoulder, rubbing his thumb back and forth over the nape of Charlie's neck.

"So we've got some time before it escalates," said Don. "Any idea how much?"

"I can't say with any certainty," she said. "It's surprising that they planted three traps in one day, on the first day. That's usually the kind of pattern I'd expect later on. If they've been watching Charlie, they might've seen that he wasn't frightened at all by the first two, and decided to keep going until he was. The perp isn't getting any return on his actions if Charlie isn't scared."

"So it might be planned out," said Ian, "but he'll change plans on the fly if he has a reason."

"It looks like it," said Reeves, "based on what we've got. It's not much."

"It's something, though," said Don. "All right, let's start going through the cases Charlie's helped us on, see if any of the perps or known close associates are the type to pull something like this. Charlie can't think of anyone on the academic side who'd have this kind of a grudge, so it's got to be someone on our side."

Don's people nodded and got to work. Sinclair and Granger headed out, presumably to wherever the FBI kept files on solved cases. Reeves pulled her chair over to Don's desk and said, "Hey, Charlie. How're you doing?"

Charlie looked up and shrugged. "All right, I suppose. How are you supposed to feel when some faceless person is trying to terrify you before possibly blowing you to bits?"

Reeves reached over and squeezed his hand. "You know we're not going to let that happen, right?"

"I know you'll do your best," said Charlie.

"No," said Ian. He wrapped his arms around Charlie's shoulders, not giving a shit who saw. Anyone who had a problem could take it up with him, and he'd deal with fallout later, after Charlie was safe. "We're not going to let anyone hurt you. If I have to kidnap you and hide you in the mountains, that's what I'll do, but you're not getting hurt again."

"There, see?" Reeves smiled at both of them, although Ian could tell it took some effort. "There are only, what, two guys who are better than Ian, and I doubt either of them is our perp."

Charlie huffed out a laugh and nodded.

"Okay. So, we have piles and piles of data to go through. The guys are going to be bringing in stacks of boxes. On handtrucks. We need some help going through it. You like working with piles of data, right? Can you come up with some way to help us sift through all this?"

"Oh, umm...." Charlie stopped to think. "I can. I mean, I'm sure I can. I just have to think of something. Let me think." He pulled away from Ian and took his computer bag into the conference room, walking slowly, like he was hesitating, trying to figure out where to go, what to do.

Reeves watched him go, her face grim. "When he was targetted by some guys trying to scare him off a case," she said, her voice low. She stopped and glanced up at Ian. "They were trying to run him off the road, did he tell you?"

Ian nodded. He remembered that, and how fragile Charlie had sounded over the phone.

"He wasn't able to come up with anything then. It's like the mathematical side of his brain shut down. At least now he's still trying. Whether we get anything helpful out of him or not, this is an improvement."

Some improvement. Ian knew what she meant, but it still hurt to see Charlie like that.

"He'll pull it out," said Don, who'd been lurking to one side. "For now, we need to make sure he's not an easy target. Edgerton, I know I won't be able to pry you off him, so you're his protection detail. Come here to the office every day. When you leave, we'll check out a different car for you each night, you go to a different motel. Charlie doesn't use his name, his credit cards, nothing. It would've been easy enough to find Charlie's office and the house, but we don't know what-all the perp's capable of. I want to err on the side of caution."

"Agreed," said Ian. "And I wasn't kidding about taking him away. If motel hopping doesn't work, we'll go on a long hike, starting with a long car trip, or maybe a plane ride. Charlie has no idea who this might be, so having him here isn't vital to finding the perp."

Don gave him a look that said Ian knew better than that. Don was emotionally involved too, though, so he just nodded. "We'll see how it goes. If we can't find this asshole, and especially if we get even a hint that he's about to escalate, I'll stuff Charlie into a backpack for you."

***

Alan came by the office later that afternoon with a bag he'd packed for Charlie, and Ian's duffle. Charlie'd complained about the motel-hopping plan, but only a little, which let everyone know he was in bad shape, because usually he'd have been protesting for all he was worth. Getting him to call his boss and arrange for some more time off had been harder, but he'd done it. Don had taken the phone when Charlie's conversation with Millie ran down, and gave her some instructions about locking Charlie's office and having everyone just leave it alone; they'd get someone from the bomb squad to go over it after the situation had been handled.

It wasn't anyone's optimal strategy, but they couldn't keep a guard on the place twenty-four-seven. Keeping Charlie away was probably the best way to keep the folks in the math department safe.

Alan had agreed -- after a lot of protesting of his own -- to pack a bag for himself and do the motel thing for at least a few days. Once it was clear Charlie wasn't staying at the house anymore, they'd have the bomb squad sweep it and let Alan move back.

Granger went out for pizza around seven. Everyone else kept working. There had indeed been stacks of boxes -- on handtrucks -- and the four clustered desks Don's team used were stacked with file folders and surrounded by piles of boxes.

Charlie stayed in the conference room poking at his laptop. He didn't seem to be accomplishing much, but his ducked head and hunched shoulders kept people from going in to bother him. He looked like he just wanted to be left alone. Ian was willing to accommodate that up to a point.

When the pizza came, though, he piled four pieces onto a paper plate, grabbed a handful of napkins and two cans of soda, and headed in. He sat down next to Charlie, put the plate between them, set one of the cans down next to his laptop and dropped half the napkins onto the keyboard. It took that long before Charlie's head jerked up, his eyes big and startled.

"Hey, cut it out!" He swiped the napkins away.

Ian grabbed them before they hit the floor and put them back. "Time to eat. You haven't had anything since lunch -- have a piece of pizza."

"More pizza?"

"Nobody asked me."

"I'm not hungry."

"I know, but you need to eat anyway. Come on, if you pass out we'll have to haul you back to the hospital and that'd suck."

Charlie glared up at him, then grabbed the top piece of pizza and took an agressive bite, his eyes never leaving Ian's. Ian just smirked at him and took a piece for himself.

Once Charlie started eating, he suddenly seemed to realize he was hungry. He went through both pieces of pizza before opening his soda.

Ian, who'd been eating more slowly, took a slug of his own soda and asked, "How's it going?"

Charlie looked down and shrugged. "I can't seem to focus. I don't know what's wrong. It's like my brain is a hamster on a wheel, running as fast as it can go but not getting anywhere."

Ian ran his fingers gently across the back of Charlie's neck, brushing the dark curls aside. "You know that's normal," he said. "You're under a lot of stress, with some horrible stuff hanging over your head. It's no wonder at all if you can't think."

"Does it happen to you?" There was a sharp note in Charlie's voice. He probably figured Ian was just babying him.

"When I first started out, sure. My first time in combat, the first time I got shot at, the first time I saw the guy next to me go down with a blown out artery and blood shot up like a fountain? Yeah, thinking clearly wasn't really on the menu."

"This isn't my first time."

"You're still not used to it," Ian pointed out. "It's not part of your job, not something you deal with every day. You're not supposed to be in the line of fire, and it hardly ever happens. This is different. It's big, it's scary, and it's okay to fall apart."

"It's _not_ okay! I'm supposed to be helping catch this person, whoever it is! I should be able to do it, I know I could help, if I could just think!"

"Charlie." Ian put down his own soda and pulled Charlie close, both arms looped around his shoulders, front and back. "Give yourself a break, okay?" He felt Charlie shake his head, and pressed a kiss into his hair. "If it were Larry, or Amita, or your dad, would you be ragging on them for being stressed out, for not being at the top of their game?"

"I... no, but... they don't, they haven't been here--" he waved a hand around, indicating the FBI offices, "--nearly as much as I have. It'd be reasonable in their cases."

Ian sighed. "I'm the expert here, the one who trains people to handle this kind of stuff. Okay? I'm the expert, and I say it's reasonable for you too. If you were an agent with the amount of experience you've had getting shot at -- or run off the road, or whatever -- I'd still consider you a green recruit."

"Fine," Charlie muttered, "but you'd expect me to pull myself together and get with the program, right?"

"If you were an agent, you would've come in with the expectation of handling violent situations, of being in personal danger on a fairly regular basis. It's a mindset, Charlie. You're not an agent, no matter what you've found yourself in the middle of now and then. You don't have that mindset. You never applied to Quantico, never considered making this kind of badge- and gun-carrying fieldwork your job. You never mentally prepared for it, and there was no reason why you should've."

"I've had training, though. I went through a course -- I was the best shot in my class -- and it should translate." Charlie was sounding stubborn. Ian gave him a gentle shake.

"That's like someone going through that Math for Non-Majors class you did back when, even getting an A in it, and expecting to be able to get their PhD in math right after. It's great that you did that course, it _will_ make you safer in the field. And I was proud as hell when you did so well on the range. But it wasn't a full-up agent's training course, and you shouldn't expect yourself to be able to perform as though it was."

Holding Charlie was like holding a sack of rocks. He was tense and still, like he was struggling to hold himself together.

He whispered, "I'm afraid. It's making me suck and I'm not used to sucking at stuff. I'm not used to sucking at _math._ This isn't me. I want _me_ back."

"I know," Ian whispered back, hanging on tight. "It's okay that you're afraid. It's okay that you're frustrated with yourself. And I love you even if you suck at math for a while."

Charlie jerked, then started trembling. For a second Ian thought he was crying, then he realized he was laughing. Just a little -- a silent, shoulder-shaking laugh. It was something, though. Ian would take it.


	5. Chapter 5

Ian went and fetched more pizza and watched Charlie eat. It'd be great if Charlie could pull some of that math voodoo out of his head and help them find the perp, but plenty of other FBI teams all over the country worked fine without that kind of help, and Don had a good team that'd do their jobs just fine even if Charlie was out of it for a while.

When Charlie finished, Ian had him pack up and steered him out into the bullpen.

"We're taking off," he said. "You've got our numbers if anything turns up."

Don got up and said, "I'll walk down with you."

They grabbed their bags and went down in the elevator to the garage, the level where the Bureau vehicles parked. Ian filled out a form requisitioning a basic two-door sedan, nothing that'd attract any notice, and Don signed on the approval line. Ian took the keys and they walked a few rows over to where it was parked, loaded their bags -- the suitcase Charlie's dad had packed, Ian's duffle, and his rifle case -- into the back, and then looked at each other.

"Hey, buddy, you take care, all right?" Don squeezed Charlie's shoulder, ducking down to look him in the eye.

"I'll be fine," Charlie said. He glanced up at Don, but only looked at him for a moment. "Ian's the best, right? We'll be okay."

"You will," said Don, as though saying so could make it true.

Ian unlocked the car and handed Charlie in. Charlie kept his laptop bag with him. He'd refused to put it in the trunk and cradled it on his knees once he was in the car. Ian closed the door, but before he could go around to the driver's side, Don stopped him with a hand on his arm.

"Hey."

Ian looked at him and nodded. It'd all been said. Ian would take care of him. The only way someone would get to Charlie was if Ian was already dead.

Don nodded, then turned and walked back to the elevator.

Ian got in, then said, "Duck down so it looks like I'm alone. Just until we're a few blocks away."

Charlie gave him a look, but obeyed without protesting, huddling down into the footwell with his computer bag flat on the seat.

When he pulled out, Ian looked around for anyone who might be watching, but didn't see anything suspicious. He picked a direction at random. When they were about half a mile away and he hadn't seen any sign of a tail, he said, "Okay, you can come out now."

Charlie climbed back up into the seat and said, "Where are we going?"

"Dunno," said Ian. "I figured I'd just drive around a while, then find a motel at random. It's not like they're rare in LA."

Charlie nodded and settled back in the seat with his eyes closed.

They drove through the neon-lit, honking night, out of downtown and onto the freeway heading south. Ian knew Charlie wasn't asleep, but he obviously didn't want to talk, so the car was silent, only the traffic noises penetrating through the glass windows.

After a while, Ian saw signs for San Pedro. The Port of Los Angeles -- despite not being in Los Angeles -- it was an old, industrial area, mostly run down. But because it was a port, it had motels. He found one that didn't look too seedy and pulled in.

"Be back in a minute," he said, and Charlie nodded, not opening his eyes.

Ian got a room, one bed, paid cash in advance. The middle-aged woman reading a sports magazine at the shabby desk gave him a look-over, but handed him a key without making any comments besides, "Room twelve."

Ian said, "Thanks," and went back out to the car. He pulled up in front of room twelve and parked, then leaned over and ran a hand through Charlie's hair. "We're here. Let's go in and pour you into bed."

Charlie blinked, then squinted at his watch in the dark. "It's barely after ten."

"You've had a long day," said Ian. "Come on, let's go."

Once they were inside, Ian made sure the curtains were drawn and the windows closed and locked. The lock on the bathroom window was broken, so he took a dowel out of his duffle and inserted it into the slide. Charlie cocked his head at him, and Ian said, "I stay in all kinds of places."

He was hoping for a laugh, or at least a grin, but Charlie just nodded, stripped down, and slid into bed. Ian followed him, spooned up behind him and gathered him close.

"Go to sleep," he said softly. "I've got you."

Charlie nodded. It took him a while, but eventually he got to sleep.

Ian pulled out his phone and called Don. "We're down for the night," he said, keeping his voice soft.

"Thanks," said Don. "I'll be heading home soon. See you in the morning."

***

Ian woke up some time later, in the dark, with Charlie thrashing against him. Ian rubbed his chest with one hand, slow and light, and said, "Charlie, wake up. Come on, it's okay, you're safe."

Charlie woke with a jerk and a cry, fighting free and sitting straight up. Ian let him. They'd done nothing but sleep in bed since Charlie came home from the hospital, and he'd had nightmares at least once every night. Ian had found the first time that trying to hold him before he was fully awake was a bad idea.

Charlie looked around, then looked at Ian, and his shoulders slumped. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, bent over, elbows on his knees.

A minute later, Ian said, "Feel better?"

Charlie shrugged.

Ian didn't have a lot of experience comforting people who were freaked out at being targetted for violence, much less people who'd also been raped recently. And most of the people he did have experience with in that area were soldiers and agents -- the kind of people he'd explained were _not_ like Charlie. And it was true, they weren't. It was also true that dealing with a baby grunt or a newbie agent who finally _gets_ in his or her gut that yeah, there are people who are trying to kill them, would generally involve as much "Grow a spine!" as "There, there." More, actually. Plus alcohol.

He didn't think alcohol was a great idea right then. Not only because Charlie seemed to be managing some depression just fine on his own and alcohol would multiply the effect, but also because he was still in the crosshairs, and slowing your reactions or fuzzing your mind wasn't smart when someone was after you.

So instead, Ian reached out and pulled Charlie backward, until he was lying down and Ian was leaning over him.

Charlie started to say, "I'm sorry--" but Ian silenced him with a kiss.

Charlie tensed up at first, then sort of melted into the mattress. His eyes were closed and he wasn't as active as he usually was, but that was fine; if Charlie wanted to lose himself in the experience of having someone make him feel good for a while, Ian was okay with that.

He kissed him, slow and thorough, exploring every inch of his mouth. He sent one hand roaming up and down Charlie's torso, sifting his fingers through the hair on his chest, then sliding down to caress his half-hard cock, then back up to tease a nipple.

That got a response -- a low, humming moan, just a few seconds' worth but it let Ian know he'd had a good idea.

Encouraged, he shifted under the covers until he was straddling Charlie's hips. He kissed and licked a trail down his body, detouring to suck on the other nipple for a few while his fingers kept teasing the first, then he moved on. Following the thick, dark trail of hair, he came to Charlie's cock -- completely erect, score! -- and gave the head a teasing lick before swallowing it down.

Charlie groaned and his hips flexed, pushing his cock an extra half inch into Ian's mouth. Ian just sucked harder, his hands holding Charlie's hips, fingers curling to knead into his rounded ass.

Low, needy noises came out of Charlie's throat, pitch shifting in time with Ian's sucking, higher and lower sounds defining Charlie's greater and lesser desperation. Ian played him, pushing him higher, then letting him sink back down, leading him down what seemed like a predictable path and then turning off the road, zigging when Charlie expected a zag, leaving him gasping protests.

Finally Charlie whispered, "Ian, please, please, now...."

His hips strained against Ian's grip and Charlie's hands clutched at Ian's shoulders, his head, straining to find some kind of hold on his short hair and failing. Charlie's legs curled arould Ian's waist, locking him down, pulling him close.

Ian took a breath and went for it, sucking hard. One hand let go of Charlie's hip and moved to tease his tight balls, tickling along his perineum and slipping a fingertip into his clenching ass. Wordless noises flowed out of what Ian knew was a bitten lip, a tight jaw, as Charlie struggled to stay silent or at least quiet and failed miserably as his orgasm took him.

Charlie came hard, moaning long, inarticulate vowels. Ian felt his body spasm, wishing he could see his face as he came. Seeing Charlie fall apart under him was one of the most beautiful things in Ian's world, right up there with taking the perfect shot. Skill and patience and perfect timing -- yeah, sex was right there with shooting.

When Charlie collapsed back into the pillow, limp and panting, Ian pulled back, gasping for breath, then crawled up and kissed him hard. He reached down to jack himself, but Charlie flailed at him, groping until he had Ian's hand in both of his own.

"No, don't, let me, c'mere." He urged Ian up closer, and Ian moved higher on the bed, his knees on either side of Charlie's torso. "More, hang on." Charlie struggled to sit up, awkward with Ian practically sitting on him.

Ian got the idea and pulled Charlie up until he was sitting with his back to the pillows, leaning on the wall, then knelt right in front of him. Charlie took his cock in both hands and pulled him closer, sucking and squeezing at the same time.

It only took a few seconds before Ian fell over the edge in a climax of his own, leaning against the wall, muffling his pleasured groans in his crossed arms.

Charlie'd been such a wreck when he woke up -- all evening, really -- that having Charlie think of him right then, push himself up out of a great post-orgasm drowse to insist on pleasuring Ian? It was like a punch in the gut. A good punch.

He shifted over, flopped down on to the mattress and pulled Charlie down next to him.

"Feel better?"

Charlie gave a soft laugh. "Yeah, you could say that."

"Good. Go back to sleep."

"Uh huh." Charlie cuddled close, and was asleep within a minute. Ian followed him before too long.

***

Next time he woke up, the sun was out. It was almost eight, which was late for Ian, but with everything that'd happened the day before, he was fine with sleeping in some. Charlie was still out, his slow breaths warming Ian's shoulder.

Ian disentangled himself from Charlie's arms and legs. He tried not to wake him up, but Charlie blinked awake and sat up, scratching his chest.

"Morning," said Ian. "I'm going to take a shower, then go find some breakfast for us. You can sleep some more if you want."

Charlie shook his head. "Nah, I'm slept out. Share the shower?" That came with a sweet, almost shy grin, and Ian had to grin back.

"Sure. Isn't LA always in some kind of a drought? We'll save some water."

They were already naked, so fifteen seconds later they were in the shower, soaping each other up. They kissed and laughed and jacked each other off, and it was a pretty excellent way of starting the morning. Ian kind of wanted to be able to do it every morning. Having Charlie with him every morning would be pretty excellent. It was just something to dream about, but it was a pretty good dream and he indulged it for a while.

They finally got dry and dressed. "Go find breakfast?" he asked.

Charlie nodded and said, "Might as well check out. We're staying somewhere else tonight, right?"

"Right," Ian agreed. "I'll go do that. You get our stuff in the car, and we'll head out."

Charlie got their bags and Ian took the room key. He headed up the walk toward the office while Charlie stashed their stuff in the trunk. Ian heard the trunk slam behind him, then a few seconds later, there was a louder BAM! that wasn't from a car door.


	6. Chapter 6

"Charlie!" Ian turned and sprinted back toward the car. A cloud of smoke drifted over the passenger side, the far side, and Ian couldn't see Charlie.

Furious rage and heart-tearing fear swelled up in him, spurting like lava searing his gut. He skidded around the car and saw Charlie layed out on the asphalt, his shirt black with what Ian immediately recognized as powder burn.

Pain shot through his knees and Ian was leaning over Charlie, one hand cupping his cheek, the other feeling for a pulse at his throat.

Charlie gasped for breath and his eyes cracked open.

"Oww. That hurt."

"Charlie." It was a gasp and a sob, and Ian buried his face in Charlie's burned shirt, fighting to stifle tears while at the same time trying to figure out how the fuck to find whoever was doing this so he could hack pieces off of them, slowly, starting at the feet and working up.

"Hey, I'm okay. I think." Charlie gave a weak laugh, then a stronger one, patting at Ian's hair with one hand. He sucked in a deep breath and lowered his head back onto the pavement. "Stupid question, but how come I'm not dead?"

Ian knelt up and looked down at the burn pattern on Charlie's shirt, then the damage to the interior of the car -- the door, the seat, the carpet.

"Because our perp didn't want you to be," he said. He pushed down the anger and fear and analyzed the scene. "Don'll get bomb experts to go over the blast zone, but my guess is this was a firecracker on steroids. The perp didn't want you dead -- he wanted you a little hurt and a lot scared. This is more than 'BANG!' printed on paper. It's a major escalation."

"How'd he find us? It must've been set up last night, or early this morning. We've only been here, what, about ten hours? Hey, maybe he came while we were playing -- that's why we didn't hear him!" Charlie struggled to sit up, still laughing, and Ian helped him, supporting his shoulders with one arm.

"Right," said Ian. "That was really fast. He either spotted us leaving the FBI garage and followed us, without me being able to spot the tail, or he has some other way of tracking you."

"My cell phone?" Charlie asked. "Being able to track a cell phone that's not in use implies some things about his capabilities. That'd mean he's not just a random crazy stalker."

"Yeah, it would." Ian thought about that, and didn't like what he came up with. "There might be something else. Maybe he managed to plant a transponder in your stuff -- your shoes, your laptop, your bag, your wallet, something you'd be likely to take with you if you moved."

"That's possible, although... he got in and out of the house without anyone seeing him. Sneaky jerk. And my office. I guess an expert pickpocket could get my wallet and then put it back?"

"They could. Have you worked any cases with pickpockets that good?"

"Not that I remember," said Charlie. He'd calmed down from laughing to just sort of grinning, but there was a manic light in his eyes and lines of tension around his mouth. He looked around the parking lot, which had a dozen or so cars in it but no people. Traffic flowed on the street about fifty feet away. "How come no one came out to check on the noise?"

"This isn't really a neighborhood where folks get involved in that sort of thing," said Ian. "Besides, from inside it probably sounded like a backfire."

"Maybe we should pick a better neighborhood next time?"

"Drawing out civilians just means more people to worry about if something's going down, or to tramp through the evidence after it's all over."

Charlie huffed out a chuckle and looked down. "I'd never have thought of it like that."

"I know. You're a good guy, Charlie. That's one of the reasons I love you." Ian leaned forward for a kiss, which he meant to be quick but which turned long and slow. "When I heard that explosion, it just about killed me," he murmured.

Charlie hugged him hard. "I'm still here. And I'm pretty sure I'm okay." He started to climb to his feet; Ian stood up and gave him a hand.

"Where'd your computer end up?" he asked, figuring that'd distract Charlie if anything would. Sure enough, Charlie's eyes got all wide and panicky, and he scrambled across the pavement to where his computer bag had landed. Ian stepped aside, pulled out his phone and called Don.

"Eppes here."

"Edgerton. Tell Reeves our perp has escalated."

Don's voice turned hard. "What happened?"

Ian described the bomb, if you could even call it that. He could hear Don's anger and fear in the long silence after. "Give me the address and we'll be there ASAP."

Ian jogged over to the motel's sign and gave Don the name and address.

"Okay, we're on the way. Sit tight. You're _sure_ Charlie's okay?"

"Positive. He'll need to change his shirt and he got the wind knocked out of him, but that's all."

"Fuck. Leaving now." And he hung up.

Ian walked back to the car, where Charlie was perched on the trunk, waiting for his laptop to boot up. He looked up and said, "I'm guessing we won't get breakfast for a while?"

"A little while," said Ian. "I remember seeing a coffee shop sort of place just a couple doors down; once Don's here we'll head over and get some food."

"We could go now," Charlie suggested. "It's not like they need us to process the scene."

"If we're not here when Don arrives, he'll go into orbit."

"We could call him and tell him where we'll be?"

"You're not going to starve in the next half hour." Ian stepped up to Charlie, moving between his knees, and leaned over the laptop screen for a kiss and a teasing tug on his hair. "Run some diagnostics or something," he said, waving down at the computer. "Make sure all your bits are lined up."

Charlie gave him a fake scowl and a heavy sigh. "If my blood sugar tanks and I faint, it'll be your fault."

"I'll accept that responsibility," said Ian. He was just happy Charlie was in a mood to be joking. His best guess was that going through the blast and coming out alive and unhurt had made Charlie a little giddy. He wasn't about to ask him, though, because how do you ask someone why they're not more traumatized? If Charlie was standing up to the latest round of shit, that was fine. Ian would take it without questioning.

***

As soon as he arrived, Don started chewing out Ian for not calling 911 for Charlie, but Charlie got up in his brother's face and insisted he was fine, he'd just gotten the wind knocked out of him, that his shirt took most of the damage. So once they wrapped up at the motel and piled into Don's FBI vehicle to head back to base, Don sat up in the front passenger seat chewing on his gum like he wished it was Ian's guts or something.

They rode back to the office in the team's SUV while the forensics team worked on the (small) blast site and the tow truck hooked up their sedan to take back to the forensics garage. Reeves and Sinclair stayed behind to go knocking on doors and see if anyone staying at the motel had seen or heard anything. Ian wasn't expecting anything to turn up from the interviews, but he'd be happy to be wrong about it.

Charlie sat next to Ian, his arms around his laptop case. He had his "thinking" expression on, and by the time they got back to the office and hit the elevator, he was tapping his fingers against his thigh, fidgetting like he wanted a piece of chalk. As soon as the doors opened, Ian watch with a smirk as Charlie charged through the bullpen and up to one of those weird clear boards they had and started scribbling with a marker.

"I guess having a bomb go off in his face is inspiring," commented Granger on his way to his own desk.

"Looks like," said Ian, following Granger while keeping an eye on Charlie.

Granger turned around and leaned on the edge of his desk, his arms crossed. He stared at the floor for a couple of seconds, then looked up at Ian and said, "I need to apologize. I mean, I made some assumptions before, and I was completely wrong. I'm glad you kept pushing"

Ian looked at him for a few moments. When Granger held his gaze, waiting for whatever came, Ian just nodded and said, "Accepted." It'd be a while before he trusted Granger with Charlie, but being able to look someone in the eye and admit you'd fucked up went a long way toward redeeming a screw-up in Ian's opinion.

He didn't have much to do, so he helped Granger go through files. They had a print-out Reeves had made with characteristics she'd come up with in her profile. They were doing a rough sort, but Ian figured it'd take whatever Charlie was putting together to thin out the already-towering stack of possibles piled up between Granger's desk and the one Ian was using.

About an hour later, Don came in and went up to Charlie. He glanced over the voodoo scribblings on Charlie's board, then ignored it and said, "I need to borrow you for a while, Charlie. You and all your stuff."

"Hang on," said Charlie. He'd stopped writing and was staring at the board, like he was trying to figure out what to add or what to change or maybe whether he was done.

"You can come back to that," said Don. "We need to figure out how this guy found you so fast. Come on down to SigInt with me, bring all your stuff, and the techs will go over it, make sure you don't have any bugs or transponders or anything with you."

"Oh," said Charlie. "Yeah, all right. But hang on a second." He still hadn't looked at Don, who'd started to radiate impatience.

"Chuck--"

"I know, I know. But I think I'm done, and if I'm going to be gone for a while, the data people can get started." He scanned back and forth over the board with his marker one more time, then said, "Okay, this is it. Hang on."

Don sighed and crossed his arms while Charlie scrounged up a piece of paper and a pen. He wrote a bunch of stuff down, apparently copying off the board. When he was done, he looked around, then called, "Colby?"

Granger looked up from the folder he was going over. "Yeah?"

"Take this to the data folks and get them started?"

Granger went over and took the paper. "Will do. Have fun getting scanned."

Charlie gave him an exaggerated scowl before picking up his computer bag and his suitcase and his jacket, and followed Don to the elevator. Ian got up to go along, but Granger tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Help me move these down to data. You've never seen this, right? Watching someone else get scanned is boring. Come check this out."

Ian scowled, and his gut wanted to go wherever Charlie was going. His head knew Charlie was safe, though -- in the FBI building, and with his brother. He told his gut to shut up and sit down, then said, "Okay, what're we doing?"

Granger fetched one of the handtrucks and said, "Ever wonder how we translate Charlie's formulas into actual data? You can't just wave his equations over a stack of folders, you know?"

Ian hadn't really thought about it, but that made sense. "Okay, so what's the step in the middle?"

"Data entry," said Granger.

Ian helped him stack folders they'd already flagged into boxes and onto the handtruck. They'd started out with almost thirty boxes; there were five to go down to data entry, wherever that was.

They went down the elevator and got off on a floor Ian had never been to. A young black woman wearing pink jeans and a Minnie Mouse T-shirt looked up and said, "Hey, Colby! The professor at it again?"

"Yep," said Granger. He handed her the paper Charlie'd scribbled on and waved at the boxes. "We're doing a first sort based on Megan's profile. This is what we've got so far. We're almost done."

"Awesome," she said. She pulled a lid off one of the boxes and ran her hand over the tops of the folders. "Great, lots of flags."

"Yep," said Granger with a grin. "Eventually we'll have everything fully indexed. Then we won't need you anymore."

She poked Granger in the chest and said, "Baby, you'll always need me, 'cause you know and I know that the professor will always come up with some weird new way of slicing the data." She looked up at Ian and gave him an appreciative going-over. "Got a new helper today?"

"This is Ian Edgerton," said Granger. "Edgerton, this is Marcia McCoy -- she's our head database jockey. Her team makes all Charlie's math useful."

"Hey, Ian," said Marcia. "Good to meet you. I remember your name from some of the other cases."

Ian gave her a quick smile. "I'm a floater. I've saved the LA office a few times in the past."

Granger said, "Hey!" while Marcia laughed.

"Then it's good to have you around." She looked back at Colby and said, "I should be able to get this set up in about half an hour, then we'll start data entry. He want me to pull the reports or should I just set up the database?"

"Go ahead and pull results," said Granger. "Charlie's kind of occupied, and Amita's not working this one. We'll have more folders for you by the time you're done entering these."

"Good stuff. Later, Colby. Ian." Marcia went back to her desk, studying Charlie's paper, and Granger led the way back to the elevator with the empty handtruck.

"So...?" He raised an eyebrow and waited.

Granger said, "The data has to be entered into the system before Charlie's equations can work on it. Charlie wrote down his formulas, plus what data he needs, which blanks on the forms, or what kind of info from the essay parts of the forms -- and that's a bitch because it's not all formatted like the fill-in-the-blanks stuff -- and what each variable should be labelled as."

"So Marcia's people type everything in?"

"Right, all the data Charlie wants to work with. Marcia sets up any new variables Charlie needs in the database they're building, and her team enters the data. She offered to write the code to get the reports herself when they're done, so the equations must not be all that squirrely this time. Sometimes Charlie or Amita need to do that part, but Marcia's really good, for someone who doesn't have a PhD in math."

The doors opened and they headed back to the deserted desks. Except for Granger, Don's whole team was off doing whatever somewhere else, and there weren't very many people from other teams around, either.

"So why don't they just enter in everything?" Ian asked. "Putting it all in, everything Charlie could ever want, when each report is filed would save a lot of time."

"Sure, and they do for some of it -- name, address, charges, convictions, known associates -- the usual stuff that goes into the standard online database all the Bureau offices use. But Charlie needs more, and the data entry takes time. It's a budget thing." Granger rolled his eyes. "The bean counters won't let us just do all of it, as it's generated. Marcia's people have this whole system -- some of what they need's already been entered, because we needed it before when Charlie was helping us. Since these files are all cases Charlie's worked, there's more entered in than usual. Marcia defines exactly what more they need, based on Charlie's guidelines, and puts a pencil mark next to each item on a form that needs to be entered in. She's the one who goes through the essay parts, looking for what's relevant. Her staff people enter the data, then put a red ink mark next to stuff that's been entered."

Ian raised an eyebrow. "You know an awful lot about the details for someone who just drops off boxes of data."

Granger got a little red around the ears and shrugged. "Marcia's hot. And it's interesting. I might not be able to understand Charlie's chicken scratchings, but I can get the database part."

"Uh huh," said Ian. He decided to let Granger off the hook and continued with, "So eventually it'll all be entered anyway. Why not do it at once? Wouldn't that be cheaper?"

"Some stuff never does get entered. Or hasn't yet." Granger shrugged. "I'm with you, doing it all at once makes sense to me too. I'm not the budget guru, though. It's way over Don's head -- I'm glad I don't have to worry about it.'

"You and me both," said Ian.

They got back to searching files by hand, accumulating a new stack of maybes. It might've been mildly interesting to read over some of the case files, for a little while, but they didn't really have time to read. They had to scan for the characteristics Reeves had come up with, then move on to the next folder. It was mind-numbing work, and Ian was pretty happy an hour and change later when his phone went off.

He pulled it out and saw it was a text message. It read, **Do you know where your professor is?**

That was it. The call ID was blocked; he couldn't call the number, or even see what it was. What the hell?

Ian grabbed Granger's shoulder and said, "Where are Charlie and Don? SigInt? Where is it?"

"What's the matter?" asked Granger. "It's down on four."

"Show me." Ian heard a snarl in his voice, and Granger must've heard it too because he headed for the elevator without asking any more stupid questions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I used to be a database jockey in my mundane life, and it always bugged me how they went straight from Charlie's mathematical models to perp photos, bam! Umm, it doesn't work that way. Even if we assumed everything was already online -- and it wasn't; we see them waving way too many paper report folders around on the show -- there's no way the FBI case report database would already have all the data Charlie needs separated out neatly in individual fields. They _have_ to have had something like this [points up] going on as a necessary intermediate step -- a room full of data entry people, with someone like Marcia to identify exactly how to take the info in the reports (especially the "write what happened" parts as opposed to the "check the box" parts or "fill in a word here" parts) and get it all entered into a properly structured database. Then and only then could you use Charlie's formulas when pulling reports.
> 
> What we actually see is basically what Colby jokes about -- you have to sort of assume they're taking Charlie's formulas and waving them over stacks of paper files. :P Or best-case scenario, you have to assume that all the data Charlie needs to work with was somehow presciently entered into the database they have at the time each case report was generated, in useful fields and formats, and so all they need is for Charlie to type in his formulas and pull a report. (Apparently the paper files are just props, in this scenario. And apparently they have a huuuuge budget, and a database admin who has a time machine and knows in advance exactly what kinds of data Charlie's going to need three years later.) I get that they don't have time on a 42 minute TV show to actually show the practicalities, but I have time, and for the sake of database jockeys everywhere, I'm showing it. :)


	7. Chapter 7

**Charlie**

After being all but dragged by the hand by Don, who seemed to think they needed to get downstairs within the next forty seconds, it turned out the techs weren't quite ready for them. Charlie tried to work on lesson plans for the next semester while waiting, but the bustling signals department wasn't exactly conducive to concentration.

They'd gone over his stuff first, unpacking his suitcase item by item, going over everything with first active and then passive detectors. His laptop bag went next, and each item got scanned -- including individual paper clips and rubber bands, which was just ridiculous. Even James Bond's Q couldn't put a GPS tracker into a paper clip or a rubber band. The tech was following procedure, though, and Charlie'd learned better than to argue with an FBI employee following procedure.

Finally, all that was left was Charlie himself. They let him go behind a screen, which was just a couple of cubicle walls pushed together to make a triangular space against a regular wall, and he passed out everything he was wearing one item at a time -- shoes, jacket, scorched shirt and T-shirt, pants, underwear, socks. He peered over the barrier on his tip-toes, feeling kind of chilly in the air conditioning, and watched the tech scan the coins from his pockets.

Another tech to one side was taking his cell phone apart. Charlie gritted his teeth and didn't protest. It was harder not to say anything when they opened the case on his laptop, and the flash drive with all his most recent back-ups.

He pulled up the memory of opening the car door that morning and being thrown onto the pavement by an explosion. For some time he couldn't measure, because his brain hadn't been fully functioning right then, he'd been sure he was about to die, that he was in pieces, or that he'd caught shrapnel and was going to bleed out, something.

We're going to catch this guy, he thought. This is annoying and inconvenient, but we've got to catch this guy.

Twenty minutes later, he was half dressed and digging non-crispy shirts out of the messy stack of clothes the tech had left when he heard Ian's voice calling, "Charlie? Charlie, where are you?!"

Charlie called back, "Here!" and waved a hand over the top of the barrier.

Ian appeared like he'd teleported and wrapped himself around Charlie, then held him back at arm's length and looked him over. "You're all right."

"Yeah, I am." Charlie grinned, glanced around to make sure nobody was looking over the cubicle wall or through the gap, and leaned in for a quick kiss. "What happened?"

"Yeah, Edgerton, what happened?" And suddenly Don was right there. Charlie felt himself flush at the thought of Don seeing him kiss Ian, but what the heck. He gave Ian another hug, then detached himself and reached for his pants.

"This happened," said Ian. He handed his phone over to Don, who looked down at it and scowled.

"Great. Our perp knows you're the one guarding Charlie."

"And he knew I wasn't with him at the time." Ian sounded like he was about to explode or something.

"Or maybe he was just guessing," Charlie suggested while snapping and zipping. "Maybe he was just yanking our chains."

"How did he get my phone number?" Ian asked. He looked at Charlie, and it was the first time Charlie'd had Ian looking at him while he was half dressed without any desire in his eyes. "That's a pretty major penetration for someone who just wants to yank our chains."

"I don't know," said Charlie. "How do phone spammers get anyone's number? Maybe it's out there somewhere and they found it. Maybe they spoofed someone you know or work with into giving it to them. Maybe they picked your pocket to get your phone and then put it back."

"Charlie--"

"Ian. I'm fine." Charlie was mostly dressed, so he leaned in and pulled Ian into his arms, ignoring the FBI people all around. They were still inside the triangular cubicle, and the only one looking in at them through the gap in the walls was Don. "The point of that message was to get you all upset, make you think something had happened to me. I'm fine. It was a bluff. Come on, I need you on your game."

"Right, I know." Ian gripped on to him, hard, then let go and stepped back. "I don't like not knowing who this is."

"Not having a target," said Charlie.

"Exactly." Ian looked Charlie in the eye and Charlie met his gaze without looking away. It was important to Ian, he knew, that he was okay with what Ian did. He'd said it over and over, he'd been there when Ian had taken a vital shot and saved lives, starting with Charlie's own that very first case. But Charlie was still that guy who'd said he didn't "believe in" guns, that first day they met. Ian needed reassurance -- although Charlie would bet his laptop that Ian would never put it that way, or agree if anyone else did -- that someone like Charlie could accept him despite what he did for a living.

"Well, I don't like it either," said Don, breaking in, his voice sharp and impatient, "but this is what we have to work with. How about if we go see how the data's going and whether we've got any decent hits."

Charlie nodded and said, "I'll be up in a minute." He pulled his shoes on and reached for his shirt. Don took off. Ian stayed, watching him finish dressing.

"I'm thinking about bringing a couple of sleeping bags into the office here," Ian said, like it was nothing special.

"These floors are concrete under very thin carpet, " Charlie pointed out. He didn't think Ian was serious, but just in case.

"They make foam pads for people with delicate asses." Ian was smirking at him. That was good -- some of the tension must've left. At least a little.

"It's more my back I'm worried about," Charlie said. "Or I could just sleep on _you_ and let you be my padding."

Ian huffed out a short laugh. "I don't have much padding."

"True. Guess you'll just have to get that foam pad, then." Charlie collected his laptop and his pocket change and his paper clips, sorting everything out and stowing it all more or less where it'd been before the tech had pulled it apart.

As they headed out, Ian paused at the tech's desk by the door and asked, "Anything?"

"No, sir," the guy said. "We checked for active and passive both, and there was nothing hidden. It's possible they got a lock on his phone, although it'd take some fairly sophisticated equipment."

Ian scowled, said "Thanks" to the tech, and steered Charlie to the elevator.

"Now what?" Charlie asked. "I can leave my phone here and check for messages in the daytime -- anyone who needs to talk to me can call you, since I'm assuming you'll always be within arm's reach--"

Ian gave him a look, and Charlie nodded. "Exactly. So I can do that for a while." He thought while they got on the elevator, then added, "You need to leave your phone too. Maybe Don can just get us both temporary phones?"

Ian scowled. "You're right -- he obviously has my number. If we're assuming he can track phones, then he can track mine."

Charlie nodded. "Okay, so new Bureau phones, or burners, or whatever they want to give us. Anything else? Were you serious about just living here until this is over with, or are we going to try a new motel tonight?"

The elevator opened on Don's floor and Ian was silent as they walked over to the team's area. "My gut wants to stay here, but that'd be kind of over the top. My brain says that if we have new phones, and take a different car, we should be all right. But I thought that last night, too."

"We're making progress, though," Charlie said. He looked around, then went to look over Colby's shoulder. "Speaking of progress, anything new?"

Colby looked up and shook his head. "David called. He and Megan talked to the people at the motel, and got a list of names from the manager. A couple of people heard cars coming and going during the night, but that's not exactly surprising. They're on their way back."

"Anything from Marcia yet?"

"She finished the programming for your new equations, and did a prelim report using the data that was already there from earlier cases. Nothing interesting popped up. She said they should have the first batch entered in another couple of hours, and she'll do another report then. By that time we'll have another stack of files to send down to her."

"Good," said Charlie. "I'll help go through files."

"Breakfast first," said Ian. "I don't want you doing a faceplant into a folder. Besides, you were complaining of starvation earlier, and we never did get to that cafe."

"We can bring food back," said Charlie. He let Ian steer him back to the elevator and down to the little place next to the FBI building.

Guess he figures nobody's going to be setting random bombs in restaurants, Charlie thought.

It should be a valid deduction. So far the perp had only boobytrapped doors and things specific to Charlie -- his office door, his bedroom door, his car engine. And that morning, not only the car he'd be getting into but the specific door he'd be using. It'd all been targetted, no guesswork, no traps at his favorite pizza place or coffee shop.

Charlie got a banana smoothie and a couple donuts. Ian got a steak-and-eggs breakfast burrito. Add two huge coffees and they were back in the office five minutes later with bags and a tray of cups.

When they settled down at a desk with files all over it -- which Charlie figured Ian had been using earlier -- Colby looked up and said, "You know, we'll probably be heading for lunch in like an hour and a half, two max."

"Ian's in charge of making sure I don't pass out and land face-first in the files," said Charlie. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ian give him a smirk.

Keeping one hand for donuts and the other for paper, Charlie started skimming through files, adding to the "flag" and "nope" stacks. He knew exactly what he was looking for, what kinds of perps he wanted to feed into his formulas, so going through the boxes went pretty quickly. They ended up going out to lunch with the team around two-thirty.

Don and Ian both spent more time eyeing everyone else in the restaurant, staff and patrons alike, and watching doors and windows and air vents, than they did eating. Charlie knew better than to try to tease them out of it.

And actually, he had to admit he was doing some looking himself, wondering whether any of the people eating burgers, fish and chips, or French dips might be their perp, might be the person who'd been watching him and planning where to plant the next bomb, how much explosive to put into it, how much damage they wanted to do. All around, it wasn't the most relaxing lunch Charlie'd ever had, and when Don looked around and said, "Everyone done?" Charlie was the first to nod.

When they came back around three-thirty, Charlie (and Ian) headed down to see Marcia. The room was slightly dim, with half the lights turned off to reduce eyestrain from staring at monitors all day. Rattling keyboards formed a constant backdrop to the soundscape, along with occasional chair squeaks and the humming of printers.

"Hey, Professor!" Marcia looked up and gave him a wave. "We're almost done, probably another hour or so."

"That's great," said Charlie. "Any way you could run me a report right now? See if anything pops?"

"Sure." She pulled up another window and clicked an icon, then a button in a dialog box. The laser printer next to her desk growled to life.

Marcia went back to data entry while Charlie waited for the report, plucking each sheet out of the tray as it emerged. He scanned down the columns, aware of Ian looking over his shoulder. One page, two, three, four-five-six-seven-eight-nine.

Charlie frowned down at the last page, trying to figure out what'd gone wrong.

"Anything interesting?" asked Ian, his voice low and curious, with a hint of eagerness for spice. He wanted to know whether they had someone to go track down, finally, and Charlie understood completely.

"No," said Charlie. He headed back toward the elevator, Ian shadowing him. "Nothing yet. None of the people I've helped catch fit the curve. So far. It's possible our culprit is still having his data entered -- Marcia will call when they're done. But they've done most of the files already and it's... unusual that they haven't hit on anything even close yet. Not impossible, of course, but it's odd."

"Odd as in 'that's weird,' or odd as in 'something's wrong?'"

"I can't say yet," Charlie said as they stepped into the elevator. "But I'm starting to wonder whether we're missing something important."


	8. Chapter 8

**Ian**

Searching through old case files hadn't exactly been fun, but at least it'd been something to do, something to occupy eyes and hands and a small chunk of brain. Once they were finished, all there was to do was wait, fidget, and worry about Charlie.

The Rockies -- or maybe the Appalachians -- were starting to look like a pretty good option right about then.

Ian had never backed away from a hunt before, but it'd never been Charlie in someone else's crosshairs before. Except that first time, but it'd been over in a few seconds, and they hadn't really known each other anyway. Now, having someone stalking Charlie, deliberately terrorizing him, working up from fear to injury and presumably to killing him? Ian wanted to punch someone, needed to _shoot_ someone, but there was only a blank silhouette where their perp should be.

Whoever it was, they knew where Charlie was and could take a shot at him whenever they wanted. Ian had no idea who they were, or where they were, could only defend against a vague, foggy threat rather than taking action against a known enemy.

He'd done that before, yes, but never with Charlie in the firing line. It made a difference. And he'd known it would, in his head, but his gut churned and his adrenaline stayed on the high end with periodic spikes up to fear/rage/panic, and he didn't know what to do or how to handle it.

Charlie came up behind him, rested his hands on Ian's shoulders and leaned down to peer at his face from one side. "You look like you're about to implode," he murmured. Of course Charlie noticed. "It'll be a little while yet. Let's go out. Walk, get some fresh air. There's a park up the street -- we can walk up, once or twice around, and come back."

"It's not safe--" Ian started to say on automatic, but Charlie interrupted him.

"There's never been an attack -- or a joke or whatever -- in a random public place. It's always been targetted, somewhere specific to me. We won't be out for very long, and even if my stalker is watching and follows us, there won't be time to set anything up. Come on, let's get out of here."

Ian knew Charlie was as close to stir crazy as he was himself. Sure, Charlie could bury himself in his office or the garage, in paper and pencils or boards and chalk or markers, for days or weeks if he was chasing some mathematical questing beast. But right then, there was nothing for his ridiculously huge brain to latch on to, nothing for _him_ to hunt either.

They were both about to punch something, and Charlie was right that a short walk out and back shouldn't be dangerous.

"All right," he said, standing up. "I'll take you out for a walk."

"You try to put a leash on me," Charlie whispered, "and I'll bite you somewhere painful."

"Maybe later," Ian whispered back, around a smile. "When we know no one's watching." He called over to Don, "We're going out, back in an hour, max."

"Up to the park and back," Charlie put in, when Don got a thundercloud look and opened his mouth, probably to say no.

Don just glared at them both, then said, "Fine, here." He fished around in a drawer and tossed a phone at Ian. "This one should be safe. Don't turn it off."

Ian nodded and followed Charlie out.

The air outside was fresher than in the office, although thick and stale compared to really _fresh_ air up in the hills -- a dull, urban smell compared to the earthiness of summer in the woods, the crisp chill of winter in the mountains. Still, Ian felt his lungs expand, a little, as they walked along.

They crossed the street, Ian watching for approaching cars and listening for any sudden screech of acceleration. Charlie turned right, led him a few more blocks, past coffee shops and fast food outlets, a drug store and a UPS store and an Apple store. A left and a few more blocks and there was grass, trees, a few flowers and a fountain, all surrounded by pavement and concrete walls, curved steel benches and iron grates and plastic trash cans.

All kinds of people in all kinds of clothes dotted the sidewalks; contrary to popular opinion, there were people in LA who walked, at least short distances. Ian's awareness took in all of them -- the ones walking, the ones hurrying, the ones standing still. Some were on phones and some carried purses or briefcases or backpacks or bags from some store. More people passed by in cars and buses and taxis. The burnt odor of exhaust blended with a warm, salty scent from a hot dog cart, overlain by the sharp, chemical smell of too much perfume as a woman in a business suit passed them, hurrying the other way.

Ian cataloged hazards in his mind, potential stashes for a bomb or hides for a shooter or people who might have them under surveillance. It was something he did without thinking, had done for a long time, but this time there was a specific target involved, and it was someone he'd die to protect -- not because it was part of the job, but because it was Charlie.

Once they entered the park, Charlie slowed down and they walked together, strolling like anyone with an hour to kill.

Usually Charlie would be chattering away about something, the patterns in the flow of people or the spraying of water or the way the tree branches swayed in the wind. That day they walked in silence.

Ian didn't mind silence. He spent a lot of time on his own, and preferred silence. He wasn't one to have music or a TV going just to fill a space with noise. Charlie's silence wasn't uncomfortable, not precisely, but it wasn't a contented silence, either.

He watched Charlie out of the corner of his eye, and realized that it was a watchful silence. It was the kind of silence he generated around himself when he was taking in the environment and everything in it, alert for dangers and enemies.

That kind of silence wasn't supposed to come from Charlie. Part of him was happy to see Charlie develop a sense that'd help protect him. Another part wanted to kill the person who made it necessary. Ian had always believed that innocence was just another word for ignorance; he'd never valued it much. But the kind of innocence that let Charlie see the world as a fascinating place full of numbers... that was worth preserving. And right then it was gone, or at least it was sharing space in his head with an awareness of the dangers all around. It was stupid, but Ian was mourning that change.

***

Ian had half expected a trash can to blow up as they passed, or maybe someone to take a shot at them. Nothing happened, except that he took the most tension-filled walk he'd ever had with Charlie. They circled the park, which was pretty enough for a patch of grass and concrete in the middle of a city, and made it back to the FBI building an hour and a quarter later.

When they got to the elevator, Charlie hit the button for Marcia's floor and went right up to her desk, Ian close behind.

"Hey, Marcia! What've you got for me?"

She look up and gave him a strange, sideways smile. "Hey, Professor. Not much, I'm afraid." She held out a print-out and Charlie studied it, flipping through pages.

"That's it?"

"'Fraid so," she said. "Sorry. Maybe there's something wrong with your original assumptions?"

"There has to be," said Charlie, buried in the pages again. "Nothing better than a sixty-eight percent probability. That can't be right." He wandered back toward the elevator, stopping halfway there to toss a, "Thanks!" over his shoulder.

"Welcome, Professor." She waved, then went back to whatever she'd been doing.

Ian followed Charlie into the elevator, then said, "So, what's wrong?"

"I don't know. I mean, Marcia has to be right -- there's something wrong with our assumptions. None of the people I've helped catch are a really good possibility."

"What about family, friends?" asked Ian.

"No, we thought of that and included known close associates. Unless we're missing something? I suppose we might have -- if someone has a partner we never found out about, or a family member who wasn't on the radar...." He trailed off, his eyes going unfocused in that thinking haze he got.

Ian nudged him when the door opened on Don's floor, and they headed over to where the team was clustered.

"Hey, Chuck," said Don. "What'd we get?"

"Nothing. Nothing usable, anyway." Charlie shrugged, his eyes on the print-outs, not meeting anyone's gaze.

Reeves frowned and said, "How could that be? I must've headed in the wrong direction with my profile."

"Maybe it's someone smart enough to plant red herrings, to disguise their behavior so it looks like a different kind of person?" suggested Sinclair.

"Possible," said Charlie. "Or it might be that we missed someone. If the perp isn't in our database, they won't show up even if the profile was perfect. I don't want to rule out anything at this point."

"And what point is that?" Don asked. He'd tensed up, like he kind of wanted to snap at Charlie but knew he was the wrong target.

"The beginning," said Charlie. "We're back at the beginning. We need a new theory about who this person is."

Megan picked up a pad and a pen, her face set in a grim mask. "All right, there are some things we know. Our perp _is_ patient, in that they're willing and able to put off the final step while they string Charlie along. A patient person can pretend to be impatient, but a truly impatient or impulsive person cannot pretend to be patient."

"I don't know," said Granger. "This has been going awfully fast. Three pranks yesterday and a low-yield bomb this morning? That doesn't sound very patient to me."

"There are degrees," said Reeves. "Someone who was impatient to have their final revenge would've just set a killing bomb from the beginning. Or shot him, or done something else immediately deadly." She looked at Charlie and grimmaced. "I'm sorry, Charlie, I know that has to sound--"

"No, you're right." Charlie waved a hand at her. Ian saw that it was trembling just a little, and he clasped Charlie's shoulder. Charlie leaned back just enough to touch Ian's chest with his other shoulder, just for a moment. "Tip-toeing around what's going on won't get us any closer to the answer."

"Right," said Reeves. "So our perp _is_ sneaky. And knows something about forensics, to be able to get in and out of your office, your house, your car, without leaving any evidence."

"All that means is they watch TV," Granger said with a shrug. "Modern cop shows are full of forensics techniques -- there are whole shows centered on it."

"But they're not very accurate," Sinclair pointed out. "I watched one that had forensics techs chasing down fleeing suspects, and conducting interrogations."

"Doesn't matter," said Charlie. "There are enough basics -- about wearing gloves, and a hat, using a lint roller, wearing new clothes and shoes. The police procedures don't have to be accurate -- even the specific forensics tecniques don't, so long as what they're looking _for_ and how to prevent dropping clues is useful to the crook."

Reeves smirked and said, "So the fact that they have female cops in high heels and skin-tight pants chasing bad guys over rough terrain doesn't invalidate the info about not leaving hairs, or changing your shoes after you've walked through distinctive mud or sand at your hide-out."

"Exactly," said Charlie, grinning back at her. "So it might be someone with a police or at least a forensics background, or it might just be someone who watches cop shows on TV."

"Okay," said Don, breaking in, "so it might be someone who watches a lot of TV, or someone who's taken some forensics courses, but it's definitely not someone who spent the last dozen years on a desert island. What else? We were assuming it was someone Charlie helped us put away--"

"Or a friend or family member," Ian put in.

Don gave him a look and continued, "Or a friend or family member. What if we're wrong about that? Who else might have it in for Charlie?"

"We talked about this yesterday," said Charlie. "Academic rivals don't plant bombs in each other's cars."

"Come on, Charlie," said Don. "CalSci gets a lot of money because of you. That's why Millie has you going to all those fund-raisers, right? Having their star genius there makes donors pull out their checkbooks."

"We have a lot of geniuses working at CalSci," Charlie said quietly. Ian squeezed his shoulder again and glared at Don for bringing that crap up.

Don ignored him and said, "Yeah, but you're a superstar even in a crowd of ordinary geniuses. Any money you bring to CalSci, or to your department, is money someone else doesn't get. That's a lot of money. Maybe someone's sick of having to eat ramen and train used rats because you're taking what they think is more than your share of the funding. We're talking millions, right? Plenty of people will murder for less."

"Yes, but...." Charlie frowned. "That's still, I mean, I still can't imagine anyone I know from school doing this. They'd be more likely to try to discredit my work, humiliate me professionally."

"What if they couldn't?" Don asked. "You're pretty solid with the math stuff -- we all know that first hand. Maybe they couldn't take you down in a proper mathematical arm-wrestle, so they decided to go for you directly."

"Then why didn't they?" Charlie rubbed his eyes with both hands. "Why start out with the pranks? If they intend to take me out, why not just do it?"

"Have you humiliated anyone, Charlie?" Megan asked, her voice soft. "Torn apart someone's theory, disproved someone's theorem, something they were getting a lot of attention for? Anything like that?"

Charlie went stiff under Ian's hand. "Well, I mean, not in any unusual way. I mean, that's what we _do._ That's how science _works._ You hammer on your idea until you're as sure as you can be that it's correct, then you toss it out for everyone else to hammer on too. A lot of ideas get disproven that way -- that's how science is supposed to work."

"What are the chances someone took it a little more personally than they're supposed to?" asked Don. He'd straightened up like he thought there was a target out there after all, just out of sight.

"Especially if funding issues were involved as well," said Reeves. "If someone perceived Charlie's dismantling of their work as both a personal humiliation and a reason why they lost funding? That'd be someone without much left to lose. Or maybe everything to gain, if they think getting Charlie out of the way will clear their way to regaining status."

"That's it," said Don. "Charlie, make us a list of everyone on the math side who might have a grudge -- money, reputation, or especially both."

Charlie just nodded and fell into a chair. Don shoved a pad of paper at him, and he started writing.

Ian perched on the end of the desk and watched, hoping they were finally going to make some progress.


	9. Chapter 9

It'd taken the rest of the afternoon and into the evening -- with a break for dinner, Chinese food that Granger and Sinclair went to fetch -- for Charlie to finish his list. It turned out that compiling the list had required writing up several pages of names, assigning them sets of incomprehensible numbers, and then calculating standard deviations to decide who was and wasn't worth including in an actual list of possible perps. Because the number of people whose ideas Charlie had disproven or possible funding he'd taken was pretty damned long.

Charlie'd gotten more and more depressed as he worked the problem. He apparently had never thought about his career from that perspective before.

During dinner, Ian leaned close to him and whispered into his ear, "Hey, don't beat yourself up about it. You said that's how science is supposed to work, right?"

Charlie whispered back, "Yes, but--"

"So if their ideas were wrong, it was better for everyone that someone figure it out sooner rather than later."

"Of course, but I feel like Mozart reworking Salieri's welcome song."

Ian just stared at him, one eyebrow raised.

"You've never seen _Amadeus?"_ Charlie asked, doing some eyebrow stuff of his own. "They show Salieri, who was a very well respected composer at the time, struggling to write this song to play to welcome Mozart to court. He struggled with every note, trying one and another and a third, backing up and trying something else, until he had the perfect next note. He got on his knees and thanked God for the note, then got back to his keyboard and did it all again for the next note, and the next. The implication was that he wrote the whole song -- all of his works -- exactly that way, one painful note at a time."

"And?" Ian thought he saw where the story was going, but was used to letting Charlie tell the whole thing.

"And Mozart arrived, listened to Salieri playing his song, and said it was nice but might've been better like _this,_ and he sat down and played a much more complex version of the same melody. Then another, different one. Just pulled them out of the air, like it was nothing. Mozart was a boy genius and he completely humiliated the much older Salieri in front of his patron and the court."

Charlie looked up at Ian, his eyes troubled. "Am I Mozart?"

"Did Mozart humiliate the guy deliberately?"

"No. I don't think so. He was just being himself. Although he was a pretty big jerk, at least as portrayed in the movie."

"Then, yeah, I think you're Mozart. Except for the part about being a jerk. You're just yourself, Charlie. You can't help it, and yeah, other people who do math for a living are going to look bad next to you sometimes. You're one of the nicest guys I've ever met, and I'm being a hundred percent serious here. But you shine like the sun, whether you mean to or not. It's just who you are. Most people are flashlights. The other math professors you know might be spotlights -- a million times brighter than us flashlights. But you're the sun and you outshine everyone, just by doing what you do every day."

"So it's natural that someone would hate me, the way Salieri hated Mozart," Charlie murmured, staring down at his lap.

"Someone who's out for himself, sure, maybe. Someone who really values the advancement of science, of math -- the stuff you do when you're not helping us catch crooks -- would respect you, and be glad you're around to help math, _their_ field, grow faster than it would without you."

He saw the corner of Charlie's mouth twitch -- almost a smile.

"You're biased."

"Maybe," Ian admitted. "But it doesn't make me wrong. Look, do you think math would be better off if you just went out and became a plumber or something?"

"No. It might be conceited, but I don't think math would be better off without me. It'd get wherever I take it eventually, even without me. But it's like you said, I'm helping it go faster. Or I would if I spent more time doing research and less time catching crooks."

"They're both important. You must think so or you wouldn't spend so much time helping your brother."

"I know, but... I don't know." Charlie looked up, still frowning. "The thought that I've hurt someone so much that they'd be willing to kill me? Or even try to convince me that they're going to kill me -- even if they don't intend to go all the way? That's not how I see myself being."

"How you are is just fine. You're brilliant, Charlie, and other people are going to be jealous and resentful. That's not _your_ problem."

"I think they've made it my problem."

"No, they've made it _my_ problem, and Don's. We'll solve it, trust me."

"I do," whispered Charlie. He leaned over and rested his chin on Ian's shoulder. "I do trust you both."

"Good. Because whoever this fucker is, whatever their reason might be, we're going to find them and crush them."

***

That night, they signed out four SUVs down in the garage. Ian loaded his gear into one and got into the driver's seat. Don drove the second, Sinclair the third, and Alan Eppes the fourth. They all left the underground garage one right after the other, then split off into four different directions.

Ian drove west, to the mountains above Malibu where it would've been painfully obvious if anyone was following him. It was sort of overkill, but he'd decided that there was no such thing as overkill in that case.

Once he was sure he didn't have a tail, he drove around for another forty minutes just because before circling up to a little motel they'd chosen in Camarillo. He checked in, paid cash, and parked his vehicle right outside the door of his room. The place was garish and only marginally clean, with an avocado-green carpet that was matted down with wear, a room divider between the door and the bed that was formed out of a lattice of plastic daisies, and frayed white curtains with bright yellow polka-dots. A faded green spread with hand-sized daisies on it covered the bed; it smelled like it hadn't been cleaned in months, if not years.

It was a basic cheap motel, and Ian had stayed in hundreds of them. He sat in an avocado green chair with stained upholstery and waited, keeping an eye out the window.

Twenty minutes later, a cab pulled up and Charlie got out, toting his own bag. Ian had the door open for him before he had a chance to knock. He pulled Charlie inside -- off the worn, dark green door mat with softball-sized daisies printed on it -- closed the door and drew the curtains before pinning Charlie to the wall for a kiss.

When they came up for air, Charlie's first words were, "Nobody followed me. Or I didn't see anyone following. It can be hard to tell at night. But this should've worked."

Ian nodded. "I didn't have to use my phone, and I'm sure no one followed me, either. You didn't use your phone...?" He waited for Charlie's confirming headshake before continuing, "so we should be okay for tonight."

"Should be. After the last couple of days, I'm not making any assumptions." Charlie leaned forward against Ian and rested his forehead on his shoulder. Ian gave him a hug, then squatted down just enough to grab Charlie around the thighs and hoist him up.

Charlie whooped out shocked laughter, then gave an Oof! when Ian dumped him down onto the bed.

"It's almost two," Ian said while pulling his T-shirt off over his head. "We both could use some sleep." He stripped quickly and slid into bed, watching Charlie, who was still pulling off his socks.

When Charlie was finally naked, Ian snaked an arm around his waist and pulled him close. Charlie turned his head for a kiss, then Ian maneuvered him down onto his back.

Ian ran his hands over Charlie's body, smaller than his own, just a little. Not quite as muscular, not quite as lean, but Charlie was fit enough for a civilian. The thick hair on his chest was purely masculine and the warm, musky scent of him got Ian's cock stiffening with interest.

Charlie gave him a teasing smile and said, "I thought you said we could use some sleep?"

"We can," said Ian. "Which makes it a good idea to ensure we both fall asleep fast and sleep soundly."

Charlie laughed and pulled Ian's head down for a kiss. Ian felt a sudden need to touch Charlie, to feel as much of him as possible. He rolled completely on top of Charlie, who spread his thighs like a cradle.

Ian had originally been thinking to get them both off fast and hard, because they really did need to get to sleep. Charlie's sweet acceptance made something inside Ian melt, though, so he slowed down without a conscious decision, just because he couldn't stand to rush.

He cupped Charlie's face in both hands and kissed him, slow and gentle, no hurry, just sinking into the feel and scent and taste of him. Smooth skin and curling hair and eager mouth and warm hands sliding over his shoulders, up to brush the back of his neck, coaxing him closer. Ian pressed in, as hard as he could -- as hard as he thought he could without hurting Charlie. Charlie always seemed to want more, said he liked the feel of Ian's weight on him, but Ian was heavier and was always careful. Having Charlie want him, love him, trust him -- it overwhelmed him sometimes, the thought of it, that someone like him, someone who killed people for a living no matter how necessary it was or how you dressed it up in words like law enforcement or protection or justice.... The thought that someone as gentle and brilliant and sensitive as Charlie would've chosen _him...?_

It made Ian wish he could pull Charlie inside his skin, wrap him up in it and keep him safe from the whole world. And so much more now, between the bitch who'd taken him, and now whatever homicidal asshole had his sights on him. The thought of losing him made Ian want to rage and die and shoot something.

Charlie giving himself to Ian was a gift. That made Charlie _his_ and nobody was taking him away, not crazy women who cared more about having babies than of taking care of them, and not crazy academics -- or whoever it turned out to be -- who thought bombs were funny.

Ian found he'd worked himself back up into a higher gear, and he took Charlie's mouth with his own, staking his claim on every bit of Charlie within reach. He dotted his face with kisses, his chin and cheeks and eyelids, before going back to the corner of his mouth, and then inside like a conqueror taking territory.

Charlie's cock rose in a solid bulge against Ian's hip. His pupils were blown. His hands clutched at Ian's shoulders, then started to knead.

When Ian came up for breath, he flexed his shoulders under Charlie's hands and said, "I don't think you're going to get me relaxed right now."

Charlie smirked up at him -- and Ian was pretty sure Charlie'd learned that expression from him -- and said, "Who said this is for you? Maybe I like the feel of your flexing muscles under my hands."

Ian had to laugh and duck down to give him another kiss for that. "My flexing muscles like your hands, so feel free."

He got a laugh back, and the hands on his shoulders shifted down onto his chest, still kneading and rubbing, then around to his back where they pulled him in closer. Ian took the hint and went back to kissing.

By the time they were both gasping for breath, Ian was pretty sure he and Charlie were on the same page about wanting to take their playing around all the way. To be sure, he brushed one hand over Charlie's dark curls and said, "I brought lube. Should I get it?"

Charlie let out a needy noise. "Yeah, definitely! Come on, Agent Edgerton -- get with it or I'll go on without you."

Ian tickled him right above his hipbone and grinned at Charlie's howling protest, then slipped off the bed and squatted down to dig through his duffle. It only took a few seconds to find the tube, then he was back on the bed, kneeling and working the cap off.

Once he had a blob of lube on his fingers, he knelt up and arched back to prep himself. Charlie's eyes went big and round, then drifted half closed with a pleased hum. Charlie grabbed the tube and lubed up his cock until it was slick and shiny, while Ian opened himself up.

He wanted to take care of Charlie, wanted to be the one doing most of the work, but thought being fucked might be too much for him. It was too soon, just a few days, despite everything that'd happened. Ian liked bottoming just as much as topping -- he was a healthy man with a functional prostate, after all -- and the thought of having Charlie inside him, big and hot and tight, had Ian's balls burning with need.

Charlie kept stroking his cock, slower, his hand curled snug but moving just enough to be a torment. Charlie liked to draw things out, and despite his teasing threat, he'd never jump ahead of Ian. One time when it'd been Ian on his back and Charlie making love to him, he'd drawn it out until it'd felt like torture. Ian had been ready to grab him and take control just to get that tiny bit _more_ he needed. Before his control snapped, Charlie'd grinned down at him, all evil and sexy, and kicked it into turbo mode.

Ian regularly got him back for that, in the best way.

He crawled forward until he was straddling Charlie's hips, then eased into position, with Charlie's cock nestled right at his hole, then slid slowly down until he felt the broad head pop through. Then he stopped. Grinning down at Charlie, he shifted his hips, clenching his muscles a couple of times, squeezing but not moving.

Charlie moaned and closed his eyes, crossing his arms over his face.

"This is pay-back, isn't it?"

Ian smirked and said, "Maybe."

Charlie moaned again and tried to thrust, but Ian leaned back and pinned his thighs down with both hands. "Be good," he teased, "or I'll stop."

"You can't stop -- you haven't started yet," Charlie griped.

Ian responded by sliding down, slowly, until he finally bottomed out, his ass flush with Charlie's hips. He squeezed Charlie's cock with his inner muscles again, then a couple more times, until Charlie was babbling curse words Ian was pretty sure his students had never heard coming from him. Probably not his family, either.

Playing with Charlie was always fun, but it was even more so after what'd happened with that bitch. Ian had been half afraid Charlie was going to have an aversion to sex for a while, maybe a long while. Ian had never known -- or never knowingly known -- anyone who was raped before, and wasn't sure what was normal. He was pretty sure aversion was a strong possibility, though, and he was relieved for Charlie that that didn't seem to be a problem. At least not judging by the way Charlie was cussing him out and demanding he go faster.

Eventually he took pity on his lover and picked up the pace. Shifting his hips around, he found the perfect angle and gave a pleasured gasp at the feel of Charlie's cock rubbing across his sweet spot. Again, harder, more.... Ian let his eyes drift closed, his awareness focusing on his ass and Charlie's cock and the fantastic friction between the two.

He was determined to keep going until Charlie came. After Charlie was a melted puddle on the mattress underneath him, jerking himself off and painting Charlie's chest with his come sounded like a great way to cap things off before settling down to sleep.

That was the plan, anyway, giving his lover the best time he could and then spending the rest of the night cuddled close, holding him, protecting him.

Charlie's frantic bucking and the hands grabbing at him weren't alarming, since Charlie wasn't one to lie still for sex unless he was tied down, and even then he moved as much as he could. So when Charlie shouted, "Get _off_ me!" and a clenched fist hit Ian in the jaw, it was a complete shock. He lost his balance and ended up sprawled on the floor, dazed and aching.


	10. Chapter 10

**Charlie**

The flashback faded and Charlie found himself curled up in a fetal ball, at the head of the bed against the wall, one arm wrapped around his middle and the other around his bent knees, his head ducked down. Sweat poured off him and he realized he was cold.

He peered around, trying to figure out where he was. A motel -- a really tacky motel. He sorted through memories, grasping for where he was, what was happening, what day it was. Marilyn had been on top of him, fucking him, but it'd just been a dream because he hadn't been strapped down and he'd been able to--

Ian climbed to his feet, one hand cupping his jaw. "Charlie? Are you okay?" He stood there, tense and worried, poised over the bed, looking like he wanted to climb on to be close to Charlie but was afraid to.

"Ian...?"

Fuck. Charlie moaned and closed his eyes, curling tighter. It was Ian. He'd hit Ian.

"Charlie? Come on, Professor, talk to me. Are you all right?" The mattress dipped as Ian sat down, but he didn't touch Charlie. "I'm sorry. It was too soon, I shouldn't have--"

"No!" Charlie glared at Ian, mad that he'd apologize, mad at himself, pissed off at the whole fucked up situation. "It was _not_ your fault, it was me, I thought... I don't know, it's like I was back with Marilyn and I couldn't think straight--"

"That's exactly it, you couldn't think straight and it's perfectly normal that you couldn't--"

"It's not normal to try to break your lover's jaw--"

"You did what you wanted to do to _her_ before, but couldn't, and I'll bet it felt great."

Charlie stared at him. He wanted to laugh and cry and cuss himself out. He managed the laughing and crying, both at the same time, and buried his face in his hands.

"Charlie? Are you okay? Come on, Professor, this hurts worse than the punch did. Can I touch you? Tell me what to do."

The pain in Ian's voice got through to Charlie, and for an instant he resented the demand. Why should he have to figure out how he felt and what Ian should do right then? He was _owed_ a breakdown. But only for a moment, because that was how long it took him to figure out that yeah, he wanted to be held.

He groped around with one hand until he found Ian, a forearm, and tugged him close. Ian took the hint and came up beside him, rubbing his shoulder, then scooting closer, right up next to him. Charlie turned and maneuvered himself around until he could plaster himself against his boyfriend, who held him while he cried. He'd feel ashamed about it later; right then the whole world was a big sucking thing that sucked, and he needed to cry about it.

***

Charlie actually dozed in Ian's arms for a while. He only figured it out when he startled awake, tried to jerk upright and Ian's arms vanished like magic.

"Easy, Professor. It's just me."

Charlie looked around, remembered the hotel room, then looked at the clock. Almost three.

He looked down and saw Ian watching him, his expression neutral, his arms spread to either side.

"Sorry," he whispered. He rubbed his face with one hand, trying to give his brain time to boot up.

"Nothing to apologize for." Ian's hand brushed Charlie's back for a moment, then rubbed up and down, long and slow. "Bad dream?"

"No. I don't know. I don't remember. I just woke up... really suddenly."

"Okay." Ian kept rubbing his back. It felt good, and Charlie wished he could relax enough to enjoy it.

He twisted around and looked at Ian, his eyes drawn to the bruise coming up on Ian's jaw. Charlie winced and looked away. "Sorry."

"It's not too bad."

"Ian, I knocked you out of bed. Should we go get it X-rayed or something?"

Charlie heard an abbreviated chuckle. "That was mostly the shock," Ian said. "I didn't expect it and when it came, I jerked backwards out of reflex and ran out of mattress."

There was still some laughter in Ian's voice, even if he wasn't actually laughing out loud. Charlie scowled at him, trying to ignore the purple splotch and swelling visible on his boyfriend's face, and said, "I _could_ have hit you hard enough to knock you out of bed."

"Maybe," Ian said. He slid his hand up Charlie's back to his shoulder and coaxed him closer. His face went dead serious when he met Charlie's eyes and added, "I'll do my best to never give you a reason to try."

"It wasn't--" Charlie huffed frustration. "It wasn't your fault. I wasn't quite yelling 'Fuck me!' but it was close. Even _I_ didn't know I was going to have a flashback. You definitely didn't know. I was having fun and was expressing plenty of enthusiasm up until suddenly I wasn't. It just _happened,_ it wasn't anything you did wrong."

They were both silent, staring at each other. Charlie was pretty sure Ian wasn't buying it and just didn't want to argue.

"We'll take it slow," said Ian.

"We'll figure out what triggered me and work around it," said Charlie. He saw Ian so seldom, he didn't want to change over to some kind of platonic friendship just because he'd freaked out once. A yawn stretched his mouth wide, and he added, "Later."

"Sleep is good," said Ian, "C'mere."

Charlie lay back down, shifted until Ian was spooned around him, with Charlie's head on his upper arm, and Ian's other arm curled around Charlie's middle. They wouldn't be able to stay that way for long, not unless they were okay with Ian's left arm going gangrenous, but it was a favorite snuggling position. Charlie's second favorite, actually -- his first favorite was right after sex, when Ian had been fucking him face-to-face and then collapsed on top of him. Ian was always worried about his weight, but Charlie loved it; it made him feel perfectly secure, like Ian was surrounding him completely.

They should've done that earlier. Thinking about it, Charlie was pretty sure he'd have been okay with Ian fucking him. Having Ian on top like that, riding him -- it'd been almost exactly what Marilyn had done.

Charlie pushed away the memory and tugged Ian's right arm chest high, then hugged it to him with both his own arms, shifting a little, feeling Ian's strong body behind him all the way down to his toes.

Almost as good.

***

The second time Charlie woke that morning, patchy sun shone through the thin, worn curtains, and Ian's fingers were brushing lightly up and down across the back of his hand where it curled against his chest. Charlie made a low, contented humming noise, shifting in place, flexing one joint at a time.

"Morning, Professor. Sleep better?"

"Mmm hmm. I suppose we need to get up now?"

"If we don't get back soon, your brother's going to call. If there's something you want to do, we probably can, so long as we check in with him, and don't have to go near your home or office."

Right. He could have his life back so long as he didn't go home or to work.

He actually hadn't been thinking about going to either place -- he'd rather stay in bed, or just go do something else with Ian, since he was going to be around for a couple of weeks and Charlie really didn't want to spend the whole time at the FBI office. Thinking about it was depressing.

But they had to figure out what was going on, since they'd gone back to square one. Charlie still wasn't convinced the perp was one of his academic colleagues, rival or not; it was just the only vaguely-possible hypothesis they'd thought of so far, and Don had latched onto it. He was pretty sure Don wouldn't want to consider any other possibilities until they'd eliminated the academic angle, though, which meant Charlie needed to help with that. He could calculate how much each person had lost, figuring in potential loss of reputation for the mathematicians whose ideas Charlie had debunked, and a way of comparing that to the losses of the ones Charlie had beaten for grant money.

Donations too. That'd be harder, but he needed to think about donation money -- that was finite too, and someone persuaded to give to CalSci because Charlie had schmoozed them in his tuxedo couldn't give that money to some other institution.

Crap. It was going to be a huge job, and Charlie was sure, in a gut-level way that he'd be mocking in anyone else, that it was going to be a waste.

"Hey, you all right?" Ian's hand came up and brushed a curl out of Charlie's eyes.

Charlie twisted around and leaned into Ian, chest-to-chest instead of chest-to-back, and snuggled back down with his head on Ian's shoulder. "Not really. I just want all this to be over."

"It will be." Ian pressed a kiss to the top of Charlie's head.

"Now," said Charlie. "My inner five-year-old wants it all to be over _now."_

Ian laughed softly. "My inner thirty-eight-year-old wants it to be over right now too. Wanting that doesn't make you immature."

"How about pitching a fit over it?"

"You're probably entitled."

"I'll keep that in mind for later."

Ian pulled him close and ruffled his hair gently with one hand. "I'll remind you," he said. "In the mean time, we can do whatever you want. Whatever you need, I'll make it happen."

Charlie leaned into the touch and let himself enjoy it for a few moments, then sat up and said, "What I need is to prove that this academic rival thing is the wrong solution. Don won't let it go without proof, so I have to work out a way to demonstrate that nobody I've embarassed _or_ taken funding from would play bomb games with me."

"Why are you so sure about that? I saw those lists, Professor -- you had pages of names. Are you positive that _none_ of them could be doing this?"

"Not in a way I can prove. At least not right now. I just...." Charlie leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and his hands scrubbing at his face. "I just know."

"Intuition?" Ian asked, and Charlie could hear the grin in his voice.

He looked back and glared at him. "Yes. Intuition is an awareness of a chain of logic your subconscious has made but not revealed to your conscious mind. It calculates the answer and then hands it to you, without showing its work. It's frustrating, but there's neuropsychological validity to it."

Ian was silent for a second, then asked, "Even if that's true, who else should we be looking at?"

"I don't know," said Charlie. "But not knowing doesn't mean it must be another mathematician. If the cookies are missing, not having any logical suspects doesn't mean the leprechauns took them, and my dismissal of the leprechaun hypothesis isn't invalidated by my not having a better hypothesis to offer just then."

Ian laughed. "I'll agree with you that it wasn't leprechauns. How about if we get showered and checked out. We can think about it at breakfast and maybe you'll have some ideas by the time we get back to the office. Or wherever you want to go."

Charlie got the impression that he was being humored for reasons he'd rather not examine, but he was hungry so he just nodded and rolled out of bed.

They were dressed and packed -- not that they'd unpacked much -- twenty minutes later, and Charlie headed for the door. Ian's hand on his shoulder stopped him.

"Me first, Professor." He tilted his head and gave Charlie a weird look. "I don't suppose I could convince you to lay down on the floor on the far side of the bed...?"

"No." Charlie knew this whole thing was getting everyone tense, but if Ian really thought there was likely to be a bomb on the door, they should call the manager or someone and have them look from the outside. Having Ian test that hypothesis with his body while Charlie hid somewhere behind a mattress wasn't a rational option in any universe.

And Ian wasn't an idiot, so if he was willing to open the door himself, he was pretty sure there wasn't a bomb.

"I didn't think so. At least take a few steps back."

Charlie sighed, but it was a minor compromise, so he backed up.

Ian watched him retreat, then turned and opened the door.

Nothing happened.

Of course nothing happened. Ian tossed him a smirk over his shoulder on his way out, and said, "I'll go over the car -- go check us out?"

Charlie followed him, and was right in the threshold, in the middle of saying, "Sure, toss me the key," when an explosion knocked him back into the room. He heard Ian shout, "Charlie!" before his head hit something solid and everything went dim.


	11. Chapter 11

Charlie woke up dreaming of an angry, shouting argument, and found that there was an angry, shouting argument going on.

"--give a damn who it is, Charlie won't survive another escalation." Ian sounded like he was about to blow someone's brains out, or at least punch their lights out. "I'm getting him out of here as soon as he can travel."

"If we don't find out who it is, he'll be in danger forever!" Don snapped. "That's okay with you?"

"We've proven we can't protect him here!"

"A safe house--"

"We took every precaution that's ever taken to get someone to a safe house, and more!"

"We'll surround him with agents!

"Forever? This perp is a wizard at setting triggers _for Charlie._ He'll set something just outside any perimeter and wait."

"Taking him someplace where there's no security at all isn't the answer!"

"Distance is security!"

A guy in scrubs came striding up, looking like he wished he had a baseball bat. "You two are going to have to leave. Right now."

Charlie struggled to sit up, and Don and Ian both ignored the new guy and rushed over to him, one on either side of the bed.

"How you doing, buddy?" Don was trying to smile. "Doc said you got knocked around a little, but nothing was broken."

"Head aches," said Charlie, taking inventory of his various parts. "Back, elbow, butt, ankle, shoulder...."

"We'll get you to a safe house as soon as the doctor releases you," said Don. "We'll keep this guy away from you."

"We'll explain the options and let Charlie decide what he wants," said Ian, which was better, but they were raising their voices again and Charlie's head throbbed.

"You two, out," said the guy in scrubs. "Right now, or I'm calling security."

Don pulled out his badge. Scrubs guy pulled out a cell phone and said, "Five, four, three...."

Ian smirked at Don, then leaned in to give Charlie a quick kiss. "Feel better, Professor. Be back later."

He and Don filed out of the room while scrubs guy glared. Charlie's dad came in about two seconds later, scowling over his shoulder.

"Sometimes I want to knock their heads together," he said, approaching the bed. "Charlie, how are you doing?"

"Feel like I got a little blown up. What happened?"

Before his dad could answer, scrubs guy said, "Dr. Eppes, excuse me? I know you're in pain from the concussion and fall, but is there any point-source pain? Like from a broken bone? Does it hurt at all to breathe?"

Charlie took another inventory and and a slow, deep breath, then shook his head. "No, it's just general aching, like someone took a baseball bat to me."

"That's normal, unfortunately. The doctor will be in to see you soon, and you can ask him for some pain relief."

"Dilaudid is good," Charlie said, remembering last time. Was it just... a week ago? Less? Damn.

Scrubs guy, who was apparently a nurse, gave him an odd look, then said, "You can tell the doctor what's worked for you in the past." He nodded to both of them and left.

"Charlie," his dad said, his expression half way between a scowl and a laugh. "He thinks you're a junkie."

"I just got blown up for the second day in a row," Charlie complained. "If I want the good pain stuff, I think I'm entitled."

"You might want to explain that to the doctor when he gets here. Aside from reassuring him that you're not a junkie, that sounds like something the doctor should know about."

"Yeah, probably." Charlie sighed and closed his eyes. "What hospital was I at last week? I don't even remember."

"Good Sam," said his dad.

"Right. Maybe they can get records sent or faxed or something."

"You'll probably have to sign something."

Charlie nodded, then decided that was a bad idea. He shifted around, trying to get comfortable. The bed was more like a regular hospital bed, only a little smaller. The room was eerily like the previous one -- linoleum and cabinets and ceiling tiles, except there wasn't an actual _door_ door, just a gap in the wall. A curtain ran on a ceiling track in front of it, but it was pulled to one side.

"What happened?" Charlie asked. "Do you know? Ian went out ahead of me -- it should've been safe."

"Don said the guy put the bomb under the doormat outside, with a pressure-sensitive trigger hooked to a timer. It's like the guy knew Ian would go out first, and set the bomb to go off a few seconds later." He reached out and clasped Charlie's hand, squeezing tight.

"Dad, I'm okay. A little banged up, but I'll be fine in a few days."

"If you have a few days. He's already hit you with a bomb two days in a row. You can't go on like this, Ian's right about that."

"Ian and Don won't let anything else happen. They'll think of something. It sounds like they've thought of a couple of things."

His dad huffed in annoyance. "And they wouldn't shut up about it. I finally had to go get that nurse."

 _"You_ got them tossed out?" Charlie stared, trying not to laugh.

"They woke you up! I know they mean well, but they have this head-butting thing going on, like each one takes it personally that the other wants to be the one protecting you. It's ridiculous."

"They're worried," said Charlie, his voice soft. "It's annoying, but I can't really be mad at them."

"Annoying I'll grant you. I just hope they don't make some stupid mistake because they're too busy arguing to think straight."

"I'll be here for a little while. That'll give them some time to cool down." He paused, remembering what he'd heard, and said, "Sounds like they disagree on what to do? Do you know what they're arguing over? At least Ian was willing to let me have some say."

"Huh. Yes, 'disagree' is one way to put it. Don wants to put you in a safe house with as many agents as he can dig up surrounding the place. Ian wants to pack you off into the wilderness somewhere far away."

Right, he remembered -- Ian didn't think they could secure a safe house, after what'd happened with the two motels. Charlie had to admit he saw the point. He wasn't sure he was up to much hiking right then, but he'd trust Ian to take care of him in a wilderness area. It'd be harder for the perp to track them, at least without Ian knowing.

What were the chances the perp had any wilderness skills?

Huh, he didn't actually know, come to think of it. He bet Ian did, though. And Don should too; the FBI had data on thousands of bombers. That'd be a simple check to run.

Although if he were off in the Klondike with Ian, he couldn't help Don's figure out what was going on and who the perp was. That was probably a big chunk of Don's objection to Ian's plan.

His dad squeezed his hand again and said, "We'll figure this out, Charlie. They both need a good clonk on the head right now, but neither of them will let anything else happen to you if there's anything they can do about it."

Yeah, that last part was the problem.

***

It was mid-afternoon by the time Ian slipped into Charlie's room, a new room up on the fourth floor, where he'd been moved to around mid-morning. He was carrying Charlie's computer bag with him. Charlie made grabby-hands at it, or at least one grabby-hand, since the other had an IV stuck in it and moving it more than a few inches hurt.

"Hey," said Ian, handing the bag over. "Had to track you down."

Charlie grinned at him and said, "Good thing you're good at that."

"I am," said Ian. He leaned over for a kiss, then another, then asked, "How you doing?"

"Still achy," Charlie admitted. "And if I move my head too fast, the world spins. Just a little, though."

"Not surprising," said Ian. "You just focus on getting well."

Charlie looked away. The delight he felt at seeing his boyfriend oozed out of him with the reminder of all the crap going on. He set the bag down on his lap and asked, "Then what? I heard you and Don arguing this morning -- about what to do with me once I'm out of here?"

Ian frowned and sat down in the chair Charlie's dad had been using until about half an hour earlier. "Don and I both want to be able to watch over you, keep you safe," he said. "I think the best way to do that is to get out of the area, go backpacking somewhere off the grid, stay on the move."

"Don disagrees."

"Yeah, you could say that. He says he needs you to sort through suspects, do your usual thing. But you can work out the math you need from here, send it in, let Marcia and her people run the sorts or whatever while we get out of town. I think what Don really wants is to keep you close, where he can watch over you personally. I get that -- I want the same thing." Ian stopped and reached out, took Charlie's nearer, free hand in both of his, cupping it in warm strength.

"I can't protect you here," he said, his voice low and tight. "This guy keeps finding us, and I can't protect you from a bomb. We need to get away, to vanish off the perp's radar."

"Ian...." Charlie sighed and let his head fall back against the pillow, eyes closed, wishing he could see a clear way out. "I want to go with you. I do." He opened his eyes and forced himself to look straight at Ian when he admitted, "I'm scared. This isn't just stupid pranks anymore, and I'm scared. But I need to be able to help Don. If he can't catch this guy, then running away isn't a final answer -- it's just a delay."

Ian squeezed Charlie's hand and said, "I'm okay with a delay. Every day you don't have a bomb go off in your face is a good day in my book." He paused, then said, "How about a compromise? I have a place in Arizona, middle of nowhere, that'd be safe. We could hole up there until Don and his people get this guy. And you can still help Don -- there's a cell tower on the ridge near my place, and you'll bring your laptop. You can send e-mail to Don. He can give us clean phones and you can talk every day."

He stopped right there, didn't try to _tell_ Charlie what to do, or even ask. He made his arguments and then left it to Charlie to decide.

Charlie appreciated that. In a lot of ways Don still saw him as a little kid who needed to be nagged and ordered around for his own good. Ian saw him as a man. He'd argue and persuade, but it was up to Charlie, and he knew that whatever he decided, Ian would go along and do his best with whatever Charlie wanted.

He had to wonder, though, how much of Ian's desire to get him over state lines and out to someplace that was probably hours from the nearest city was based on a logical evaluation of their options for solving the problem, and how much was based on an emotional need to just protect him no matter what. Charlie could appreciate Ian wanting to protect him -- right then he was perfectly all right with having someone protect him, because if Ian felt kind of helpless against random bombs, Charlie was even moreso -- but was it the right choice?

The only way to solve this once and for all was to catch the perp. Maybe he could do that just as well from Ian's place, but being far away from Don and the team? It felt like being cut off from the center of activity.

Which was the point, of course.

"I'll talk to Don. Maybe he has a better idea. If not, we'll go."

Ian's lips got tight, and Charlie knew he wanted to keep arguing, but he just nodded. They sat silent for a few moments, then Ian asked, "Do you need anything? Change of clothes?"

"Dad went to get it. He said my bag got kind of mangled? And he has a class at two I told him to go to; he's been with me since last night, and all he can do is sit there. I appreciate it, but he was just looking at me and thinking about how he couldn't do anything to help. It's not good for him, and it was kind of driving me nuts."

Ian nodded. "I get where he's coming from. Your dad's a great guy."

Charlie grinned. "I'm glad you think so."

"I even like Don, when he doesn't have a big rock in his head."

"Ian!" Charlie reached over and smacked Ian's hand, laughing, but the hand doing the smacking had an IV line in it, and it jerked right before impact. "Oww!"

"Hey, don't mangle yourself!" Ian took Charlie's aching hand and inspected the IV site. Apparently it looked okay because he put it down again with a light caress.

Charlie grabbed Ian's hand before it got too far away, and squeezed. "Hey. You know if it were just a matter of a getaway, like a vacation, I'd go with you in a heartbeat, right?"

Ian cocked his head like he was trying to figure Charlie out. "Of course. I'm not worried that you're choosing Don over me -- he's your family and I get that. I just don't want anything to happen to you, and I honestly think the best way to do that is to get far away from the guy trying to hurt you."

"No, that's not it at all!" Charlie tugged harder, coaxing Ian out of the chair, until he was leaning over Charlie, close enough to reach up and kiss him. "It has nothing to do with Don being my brother," he said, pulling Ian down even closer, until he had an elbow on Charlie's pillow and their foreheads rested together. "I'm trying to figure out what's the right thing to do, how to solve this for good. We need to catch this guy. If I were confident that the team could catch him while I'm gone, then I'd go. But if I'm not here then he'll either try to chase me, which means we'd be out in the middle of nowhere with no backup, or he'd stop doing what he's doing, which would mean they'd have no more data coming in and the chances of catching him would be slim. We have to catch him."

"If you come with me and he follows, we'll catch him," Ian promised. "The place in Arizona, it belonged to my grandparents. I spent every summer there as a kid, and I've spent a lot of time there between jobs. I know the place as well as I know my rifle. There's no place anyone can hide there that I wouldn't find him, no crowds to lose himself in, no way to approach that I wouldn't see. It's my territory and we'd absolutely have the advantage there."

Charlie tilted his face up for another kiss. "All right. I still want to talk to Don. He's going to have to make a really good argument, but he deserves the chance to try."

Ian nodded. "I understand. I'll do whatever I have to do to take care of you. I'd rather do it there, but if I have to do it here, then I will."

"I know."


	12. Chapter 12

**Ian**

Ian parked in the uncomfortable chair and watched Charlie work. He sank into his math, focusing inward, his whole world shrinking down to encompass only his formulas. It reminded Ian of what he himself did when he was focused on a target a klick away, still and watching, waiting for the shot.

Charlie's focus was more obviously active, but the mindset was very similar, and Ian thought sometimes that that was why they got along so well. No matter how different their work seemed to be on the surface, their mode of attack was enough alike to strike a chord between them.

One difference between them was patience. Ian could sit and wait for hours -- days if necessary -- whereas Charlie always needed to be doing something, even if it was just furious thinking. Ian waited, watching his lover, sitting so that the half-open door to the room was within his peripheral vision.

He wasn't moving much, but when he did -- hands and wrists, head and neck, shoulders occasionally -- the movements were stiff, obviously painful. Tiny cuts and scrapes spotted every visible inch of his skin, and bruises were blooming in deep blue and purple. Ian didn't let himself react, at least not outwardly, but seeing Charlie like that, seeing the evidence that he'd been hurt, that he was hurting, pissed him off.

That was something he tried to keep separate from Charlie. He didn't always succeed, but the sniping thing was bad enough; he didn't need Charlie to get the idea he was short tempered too. And he wasn't, not really. He was a pretty even tempered guy, actually, and it took quite a lot to get him to start boiling over.

Someone deliberately hurting his boyfriend was enough.

But he didn't want to frighten Charlie. Ever. He'd cut off his hand before he'd ever give Charlie a reason to be afraid of him. And yeah, he worried about that, because no matter how long they'd been seeing each other, no matter how sure, how absolutely sure he was that Charlie loved him, he couldn't forget the original hostility, or the reason for it. When he was lying in a strange bed in yet another tacky little motel room, staring at the dark ceiling while the monsters in the depths of his head came swimming to the surface, one of the biggest, ugliest, scariest ones was the image of Charlie backing away from him with fear in his eyes, fear that became hate before he turned away.

Ian's forebrain knew that wasn't going to happen, but the image lurked anyway, deep in his lizard brain where ugly fears were tough to root out. Sometimes impossible.

He watched Charlie all afternoon, until his doctor came in around five for a check. The doctor decided Charlie was doing all right, that he was well enough to go home if he had someone to look after him. Twenty years ago they'd have kept him for a few more days, but that wasn't how the health care system worked anymore, so the doctor wished him well, told him to avoid bombs for a while, then went away to get his discharge paperwork processed.

Charlie's dad came in a few minutes later with a plastic grocery sack of clothes, and helped Charlie get dressed. Ian stood back by the door and kept an eye on Charlie and the hall, letting his dad be the one helping him; he could tell the guy was dying to do _something_ to help his son, and it seemed only right to let him.

A nurse came in with Charlie's discharge paperwork, including a prescription for pain pills and something for the dizziness.

Ian had expected Don to show up by then. Since he hadn't, Ian pulled out his phone and called him.

"Hey, Charlie's been discharged."

"Good. Bring him back here."

"On it." It felt like sliding back into the predictable groove the perp would be expecting, but they didn't have many options at that moment, so Ian went along.

Charlie's dad loaded Charlie into his car; Ian followed them in his rental, back to FBI headquarters, into the (supposedly) secure underground parking. Walking from the car to the elevator, then from the elevator to Don's team's cluster of desks, had Charlie limping and obviously trying not to pant. Ian steered him down into the closest chair, which turned out to be Granger's. Granger could deal.

"So now what do we do?" asked Mr. Eppes, looking at Don. "Your idea about motel hopping obviously didn't work. He can't come home. I doubt your apartment would be any safer. He can't camp here at the office for however long this takes. So now what?"

Don said, "Now we get him into a safe house. We'll surround it with agents, make sure no one we don't know gets close."

Ian clamped his jaw shut on all his objections, and looked at Charlie.

Charlie glanced up at him, then looked at Don and said, "That's not our only option."

Don said, "Charlie, come on," while glaring at Ian. Ian just stared back.

"What's the percentage on safe houses being penetrated by a criminal?" asked Charlie. "Or even detected?"

Don looked down at him and said, "Less than twenty percent."

"I'm going to assume that means more than fifteen percent," said Charlie, "or else you'd have said less than fifteen. Is that detection or penetration?"

"Penetration," Don admitted. "And it's about sixteen percent. Best numbers on detection is about twenty-three percent, but we can't always know so that's a best estimate." Ian could tell it killed Don to say that, but they all knew Charlie needed good numbers.

"So in some cases, the criminal might just be keeping tabs on the person you're protecting, or you might've moved them before any action could be taken."

"Yeah, maybe. And sometimes it's a pizza delivered to the wrong address, but that still counts."

"Because it could've been a bad guy testing your boundaries."

"Yeah."

"Okay, so if I go into a safe house, I have at least a twenty-three percent chance of being found. And you have to admit, this guy has proven to be particularly good at finding me. If he finds me, we know for a fact he won't be satisfied with just watching."

"We'll have two agents in the house with you at all times, and two more on the perimeter. Even if he figures out where you are, he's not going to get anything explosive near you."

"He'll try."

"And that's how we'll catch him."

"He's clever. How many agents will he blow up before then?"

"We're pros, Charlie. No one's gonna get blown up."

It was like watching a tennis match, back and forth between Charlie and Don. Charlie was getting stressed out and a little defensive, and Don was getting impatient. There was more going on than just procedure, and nobody seemed to want to get in between them, not even their dad. Ian certainly didn't, at least not yet.

"That's hope, Don, not reason."

"We don't operate on hope here, Charlie!"

"You're right -- it's professional arrogance."

"Charlie--!"

"You can't say everyone's going to be all right. Anyone would've gotten caught by that delay trigger that got me. Ian didn't think of it, and you wouldn't have either. None of you."

Ian gritted his teeth at that, because it was true. He'd walked right over a fucking bomb and Charlie'd ended up in the hospital while he himself had barely a couple of bruises. He knew guilt was unproductive, but he couldn't banish it completely.

"Charlie...." Don looked away, his jaw flexing, like he was trying to stop himself from yelling at his brother. He finally looked back and said, "There aren't any guarantees, but this is what we do and we're good at it. We'll protect you, I promise."

"I don't want anyone dying for me," said Charlie, his voice low. "I think leaving would be better."

"If you leave then we won't catch him!" Don snapped. "We've got to get him, and we can't do that if you follow him off into the wilderness."

Before Charlie could respond, Reeves said, "What if we could do both?" Everyone stared at her, Don with an impatient look. "What if we take Charlie to a safehouse, disguise him as an agent, and smuggle him out at shift change? Then he can go with Agent Edgerton while the perp is still watching the safe house."

"It's not about me!" Charlie had some frustration of his own going on, and it was coming out in a raised voice and clenched fists. "That just means I won't be around to hear agents getting blown up for me. That's not acceptable."

"No, hang on," said Don. He stared at Reeves, then at Charlie, then at Ian, then back at Charlie. "Damn. Okay, yeah, that's a good idea."

"What? No!" Charlie jumped to his feet, and Ian put a hand on his shoulder. Just as well, because he swayed like he'd lost his balance.

Charlie ignored both Ian's hand and his swaying body. "No. I don't want anyone playing decoy for me."

"Well, that's too bad, Chuck, 'cause that's how we're playing it. We don't have any better ideas, so this is the one we're going with."

"I won't do it."

"Yeah, you will." Don had his cold, middle-of-an-op expression on, and Ian was pretty sure he wasn't going to budge. Which was fine with Ian, because he agreed that Reeves's idea was the best one they had.

"No! What makes my life more valuable than any of yours? Or any of the other agents you're going to drag into this?" Charlie was sounding more and more stressed, and Ian shifted so he had hands on both of Charlie's shoulders, rubbing and kneading, lightly, trying for comfort, because he knew that this was it, that the thought of other people -- anyone else, even faceless agents he'd never met -- getting blown up for him was probably going to be the last straw, the last grain of sand that collapsed Charlie's already over-burdened psyche. He'd had too much crap raining down on him in the last week, and this was going to be a major blow.

Ian just hoped he could handle it, because he was going to need Charlie functional.

"You're not that special," said Reeves. Her voice was low and her gaze intense. She pinned Charlie with it, forcing him to pay attention to her. "You're a civilian, Charlie. Our job is to protect civilians. We get beat up, shot at and caught in bomb blasts as part of the job. You know that. This time it'll be for you. Last week it was for that woman who worked at an import store. Last month it was for a gun runner's accountant who decided to turn state's evidence. It's not about being more worthy than anyone else. It's about letting us do our jobs, the same jobs we do no matter who's involved."

"But--"

"No," she said. "This is the best plan we have, and we need to do our jobs. If you help us, we have the best chance of catching this guy with the fewest casualties. If you fight us, we'll have to try to work around you, and things are more likely to go bad. You need to help us now."

"I... but...." Ian watched Charlie try to find a loophole, searching for some logical reason why she was wrong. But Reeves was good -- all that psych training was good for something -- and he didn't find anything.

Ian could tell, just by looking at the back of Charlie's head, exactly when his inner scaffolding collapsed. He caught him, turned him around and held him up, one arm around his waist and the other just below his shoulders, and let Charlie bury his face in his shirt.

He knew how strong Charlie was, but it'd been too much all at once. Everyone had a breaking point, and they'd hit his.

"It's okay, Professor," Ian whispered. "Just let go. Let us handle this."

He felt Charlie shaking his head, felt it rubbing back and forth on his chest, but Charlie didn't actually say anything and Ian knew they'd won. It didn't feel good, but that didn't matter. They had a plan, and Charlie would go along with it, even if he just let himself be dragged from one point to another. That was enough for right then.

Ian would worry about helping him get it all back together later, once they were safe at the ranch. He knew Charlie was hurting, and from a lot more than the blast damage, but having Charlie alive to _be_ hurting was preferable to the next most likely alternative, and Ian was willing to take that.


	13. Chapter 13

**Charlie**

They did the multiple-SUVs trick again, but without the taxi because nobody was willing to let Charlie be alone, or at least without agent escort, and none of the agents assigned to the op were happy about being a passenger in a car that might have to get evasive.

Don said they wanted the perp to know where Charlie was going, but they didn't want to be obvious about it, so the SUV Charlie was in headed down to Bellflower before circling around to the safe house. Charlie fell asleep in Bellflower and didn't know what town he was in when an agent he'd never met before getting into a car with her tapped his shoulder to wake him up.

Charlie knew what they were doing was wrong, but he didn't have the energy to protest anymore. And the fact that he was going along without protesting made him hate himself a little -- or maybe a lot -- so his focus was on the dark, sucking hole inside himself where his soul used to be, and all he registered about the house was that the driveway was long and there were some concrete steps up to the front door.

He settled his aching body down onto a naugahide couch and the agent, a tall, muscular woman with red hair pulled back in a ponytail, said, "There's sandwich makings in the kitchen, if you're hungry now. We'll probably order a pizza or something after the next shift comes in at six."

"I thought I'd be leaving with you. Isn't that the point of this?"

"No, we're letting a full shift go by. Shift change is at six and six, so you'll be leaving first thing in the morning." She paused, then added, "I can ask one of the guys to give you a wake-up call whenever you want."

"I'll be fine," said Charlie. "I doubt I'm going to sleep much anyway."

"You should try to sleep while you can," she said, her voice too gentle, like she was being careful with him, like he was someone she _had_ to be careful with.

"That's the question, though, isn't it? Whether I can." Charlie shrugged. "I'll try. I don't think I'll be able to, though."

"Well, food is next best," she said. "Make a sandwich, or wait for pizza, and when you've eaten, try getting some sleep. Your body might surprise you."

"Maybe," said Charlie, who didn't believe it but just wanted her to shut up and go away. It worked; she left him alone and he sat on the couch staring at a cold, dirty fireplace. There was a huge clock hanging over it, a big wooden sunburst sort of thing that looked like it'd been there since the seventies, fastened to the brickwork somehow. The clock said it was about eight-thirty-five, which Charlie knew was wrong. He stared at it long enough to be sure it wasn't running at all.

His thoughts flitted back and forth between childhood memories and recent lectures and old cases, always returning to the previous week, to Marilyn and sex and pranks and bombs, always going back there no matter how much he wanted to ignore it, like a tongue that wouldn't stay away from a sore tooth.

He was vaguely aware of the red-haired agent talking on the phone, then less than a minute later a knock on the door. The agent checked the peephole and opened it, and two agents came in. David entered first carrying a pizza box, and behind him was Don. Charlie looked away and Don didn't try to talk to him, just got a briefing from the red-haired agent about what'd happened, which wasn't much.

The warm scent of tomatoes and garlic and oregano and cheese wafted over to Charlie, and he realized he was hungry. And that it was six -- shift change. He'd lost a few hours, but didn't really care. It wasn't important, really. They were just counting down to the time when he'd be smuggled out disguised as an agent, leaving people behind to be decoys for a mad bomber.

The red-haired agent, whose name he still didn't remember, stayed to have a couple pieces of pizza. Her partner, who'd been in the house when they arrived -- or at least Charlie assumed so, he hadn't noticed the guy come in so he must've been there -- left without eating. The woman dropped a paper plate with a two pieces of pizza into Charlie's lap, along with a paper napkin. He ate it with regular, mechanical bites, his thoughts still drifting.

The here and now was unacceptable, unethical, wrong, he couldn't stand to be there so he wasn't -- he just floated away.

The red-haired agent left at some point. He didn't notice her going, just realized at some point that she wasn't there any more. The clock over the fireplace still said eight-thirty-five. Don nagged him upstairs to bed at some point. Charlie took off his jeans and T-shirt and shoes and got under the covers; he could let his thoughts roam just as well lying in a bed as sitting on a couch.

Charlie's thoughts roamed and he was pretty sure he hadn't actually slept, but he wouldn't have been able to swear to it one way or another. When a glance at his watch showed him it was a little after five, he got up and put his jeans and shirt and shoes back on. He went down to the kitchen and found cereal, poured it into a bowl with milk and ate. He wasn't hungry, but he knew that if he didn't eat something people would nag him, Don would nag him, and Charlie'd didn't want to have to talk to anyone if he could help it.

Charlie was rinsing his bowl out in the sink when David came in. "There you are. You ate, good. Here, put these on -- next shift'll be here in a few minutes." He held out the FBI jacket and ball cap Don had been wearing.

Charlie nodded, put on the jacket and brushed his longer, curlier hair back with one hand before putting the ball cap on.

There was a knock at the door and Don came trotting downstairs. He still had his phone in his hand, but he looked through the peephole anyway before opening. The red-haired agent and her partner came in, and she said, "Granger and Thompson are in position outside."

Don nodded and closed the door, then said, "You ready to go, Chuck?"

Charlie nodded and took a few steps closer to the door.

Don cocked his head and asked, "Hey, buddy, you okay?"

Charlie nodded again.

"Seriously," sand Don. "Talk to me. I know you're upset but we have to do this -- you get that, right?"

Charlie gave him a third nod. He really didn't get it, but he wanted this to be over with, he wanted to get through it as soon as possible, and the fastest way to get through it was to just agree with whatever Don said.

"Charlie...." Don sighed. "Okay, you're mad at me. I get that, and it's fine. Go ahead and be mad at me if you need to. But I'm going to do whatever it takes to keep you safe. It'll be okay, you'll be with Edgerton soon, and that'll be good, right?"

The thought that Don believed he could dangle Ian in front of Charlie, that Charlie was just some kid in a snit because he wasn't getting his own way, and that dangling his boyfriend in front of him like a favorite toy could make everything right again? Having Don think that was offensive in a way Charlie couldn't even find words for. He gave Don a look that should've left a smoking crater in the living room floor, then turned to David and said, "Let's do this."

David glanced up at Don, then nodded and said, "Okay, we're heading out." He headed for the door and Charlie followed him into the dim, grey pre-dawn light.

"Don't duck your head," David whispered. "Walk like Don -- head up, like you own the world."

Charlie gave a snort that would've been a laugh if he'd been in any mood for laughing, but he held his head up and looked around, lengthening his stride a bit to take the lead, because Don wouldn't just follow a subordinate.

"Which car?" he whispered.

"There," said David, and Charlie led the way toward the silver SUV indicated. The door locks clicked open and Charlie climbed in on the passenger side, still holding his head up.

Colby raised a hand as they passed him on the long driveway, and then they were away. Charlie kept an alert posture when he just wanted to lean back in the seat, just in case they were being watched.

If they were, then this whole thing was trashed. Although if they were being watched, if the perp knew Charlie was in the car driving away, at least the agents at the safe house wouldn't be in danger.

They circled around for a while, then headed to LAX. David had him shuck the FBI jacket and hat, and when they pulled up he handed him a ticket to Phoenix.

"There's a bag in the back seat," said David. "Small carry-on, so you don't stand out travelling with nothing. Edgerton has your stuff, he'll meet you in Phoenix, and he promised to take care of your laptop like it was his rifle." He gave Charlie a quirky smile at that, and Charlie made an attempt to copy him. Judging by the expression David's face shifted into, he didn't do a very good job.

"You take care, Charlie. Relax, recover, let us worry about all the crap here."

Charlie nodded and climbed out of the SUV. He got the bag -- about the size of a backpack, in an anonymous black -- out of the back seat, then said "Thanks," and walked into the terminal.

***

He woke up out of a doze as the plane touched down. While walking out through the jetway, Charlie wondered for a minute how he was going to find Ian, but it turned out Ian was waiting for him at the gate. He'd probably waved his FBI badge around. Which was good, because Charlie wasn't up to figuring out anything hard, and finding Ian at the Phoenix airport -- what did they call the Phoenix airport? Charlie didn't know, and didn't really care -- would've been a harder problem than he could solve right then.

Ian said, "Hey, Professor," and gave him one of those staring-through-to-your-bones looks, then took the black bag and headed out up the concourse, steering Charlie with light pressure of his fingertips on Charlie's back.

Charlie was steered out of the terminal and through parking (dim, hot, concrete, open and claustrophobic both at once, smelling of exhaust) and into a huge pick-up, a blue-green Chevy monstrosity that looked like it was older than Charlie. The black bag went in the back under a black plastic tarp that was lashed to gromets built into the sides of the bed, and they headed out.

They drove for a while, out of town and through barren terrain, dirt and rocks and the kind of sparse plant life that doesn't need much water. Charlie was still tired but actual sleep didn't seem to be one of his givens right then, and working for it was too much... well, work.

He didn't want to work. Didn't want to do anything. He felt like a package being transported around. There was probably a label on his back, between his shoulderblades where he couldn't see it. He didn't have to see it; only the people transporting him needed to see it.

So they drove through the desert, toward the distant mountains.

After some time and an unknown number of miles, Ian pulled over at a snack/service place sitting all by itself on one side of the highway. He went out to pay for gas and came back with sodas, pumped the gas, then pulled around behind the small store and parked in a sliver of shade cast by the low building.

Charlie sat with a can of soda in his hand. His eyes were pointed in the direction of the can, but he hadn't bothered opening it yet, wasn't sure it was worth the trouble.

Ian looked at him for a while, then said, "Hey, c'mere." He reached over and popped Charlie's seat belt open, then tugged him sideways down the bench, manhandling him up and around. The reaction times in Charlie's brain were running a few seconds behind, so the next thing he knew he was straddling Ian's lap, the top of his head brushing the roof of the cab, and Ian's arms were around him, warm and strong, while Ian kissed the breath out of him.

Charlie felt a hand push up under the back of his shirt, the broad palm kneading, the familiar feel of calluses against his skin.

Something popped, like a big bubble in his head, and Charlie felt all the tension flow out of his body. He curled up against Ian's shoulder and exhaled, releasing all the worry and stress and guilt, and let Ian rub his back and murmur soft words into his ear. Charlie wasn't present enough to be aware of what he was saying, but the sound of his voice, the familiar timbre and gentle tone were enough to penetrate all the way to his heart and let him relax from the inside out.

Charlie wasn't in control. There was no action he could take to stop what was happening to him, nothing he could say or do or calculate that'd make the perp stop targetting him. It was going to happen no matter what, and he just had to accept it. Not let the guy kill him, not that at all, but know that all he could do right then was be careful, react to what happened, and let Don and Ian do what they did, what they were trained to do, to protect him.

He didn't like it, but that was how the situation was, and it didn't matter whether he liked it or not.

Charlie inhaled, then huffed out a breath against Ian's collar. He became aware of the hand on his back, warm against the skin under his shirt, and the other hand gently ruffling through his hair.

"Feel better?"

He nodded.

"Ready to go?"

Charlie nodded again and shifted his weight, sitting up to look at Ian. There was no impatience on his lover's face, or condemnation, or disrespect, or even pity. Ian knew what he needed, and that included time to figure out how to handle things. He'd give Charlie however much time he needed, unless bullets were actually flying. Or a bomb was ticking down.

The bomber was a few hundred miles away, though, and they had time.

Charlie managed a small smile and gave Ian a quick kiss, then shifted back to his own seat and put his belt back on. He popped the top on his soda, and Ian pulled back onto the highway.

They still didn't talk much, but the atmosphere in the truck was different, like the difference between a sunny day that was clear to the horizon, and a cloudy, oppressive day with storm clouds hovering overhead.

Another hour and the road started to climb into low, brown hills. The highway narrowed to two lanes, and wound through valleys and around outcroppings, gaining altitude as it went. Ian finally turned off onto a dirt-and-gravel road. A couple of miles in, they stopped in front of a metal gate.

Ian fished a small ring of keys out of his pocket and handed it to Charlie. "Get the gate? This one."

Charlie took the key indicated and hopped out. He had to fuss with the padlock for a few seconds, but finally it popped open and he swung the gate clear. Ian drove through, and Charlie locked the gate again before climbing back in.

Twenty more minutes of slow driving along the winding, gravelled track brought them within sight of a sprawling single-story house, blue-grey paint and dark wooden shingles with a stone chimney. A porch stretched across the long front, and a broad patch of gravel to one side provided decent parking.

All around the house, extending for what looked like a mile or more behind it so far as Charlie could tell, squinting, was meadow. Not a lawn, not trimmed and tended monoculture, but wild grass, a lush mix of varieties scattered with flowers and other low, wild plants, and dotted here and there with the occasional twisted tree.

"High meadow," said Ian, who opened the door and slid out. "We used to have a few hundred sheep. Now it's the family vacation home." He threw Charlie a crooked grin, then unlaced the tarp and pulled Charlie's carry-on bag out.

Charlie climbed down and grabbed it, insisting on taking it himself. It didn't weigh much -- he wasn't even sure what was in it, since David had said Charlie's things had been sent ahead with Ian. Presumably his actual suitcase was already in the house. And his computer bag, which was arguably more important than shirts and underwear, being less easily replaceable.

The air smelled clean, in a way it never did down in LA, not even in the parks in the low hills where he liked to hike. He didn't usually notice the air pollution -- he'd lived in it most of his life, long enough that he'd gotten used to it and his conscious mind just filtered it out -- but having clean, fresh, _wild_ air to compare made the difference ridiculously obvious.

Some low bushes with leathery green leaves and tiny white flowers stood sentinel in front of the porch, set at even intervals that indicated deliberate planting rather than wild happenstance. A sweet scent wafted out of the tiny flowers; Charlie walked through a cloud of perfume, following Ian up the wooden steps and onto the wide, covered porch.

Another key let them in. The front room was about the size of Charlie's at home, which made it large for the time the house was likely built. A stone fireplace dominated the right-hand wall.

"Kitchen's on the other side," Ian said, pointing to a door. Not a doorway, but an actual door, standing closed. "Bedrooms back there and there." He pointed to a door on the left side of the front room, near the front door, and another door in the back.

Charlie followed Ian through the rear door, which led to a short hallway that extended to the right and left.

"Bathroom down there," Ian said, pointing to the right. He grinned over his shoulder and added, "My grandfather added it on. Before that it was all tub baths in the kitchen, and the outhouse in the yard."

"My thanks to your grandfather," Charlie said. He could rough it while camping without much trouble, but discovered a psychological block to the idea of primitive plumbing while he was actually in a house. Cognitive dissonance sort of thing.

Ian led him left down a short stretch of hallway that dead-ended at a door. It led to a bedroom with a double bed and an old, carved dresser. A row of hooks on the wall opposite the dresser answered any questions he might've had about a lack of closet.

Charlie cocked his head at the bed and said, "Good thing we don't mind snuggling."

Ian huffed out a laugh. "Yeah, well, I figured that wouldn't be a problem. And I'm sort of used to having my feet stick off the bottom."

"Nice thing about being short is not requiring a freakishly long bed," Charlie teased, dropping his bag in a corner.

"Nice thing about you being short is I can curl up around you and have all of you right there, tucked in close," Ian said, his voice low as he cornered Charlie against a wall, right next to Charlie's suitcase and computer bag, which he almost wanted to check on right then but Ian kissed him and his computer wasn't _that_ important.

Charlie pushed it to one side of his mind and let himself be tucked up against Ian's bigger body, because he liked that too.


	14. Chapter 14

They'd ended up scattering their clothes on the hardwood floor and flopping onto the ridiculously small bed. Ian had pulled Charlie close, then rolled so he was on the bottom. It wasn't the first time Charlie'd been on top, but it wasn't usual, either; Charlie liked the feel of Ian pinning him to the bed, his whole body covering him, the weight pressing him down, between him and the rest of the world. That day, though, Ian just smiled up at him and whispered, "Whatever you want, Professor."

Charlie was pretty sure he knew what'd gone wrong the last time. Ian had meant well when he'd decided not to penetrate Charlie after the whole Marilyn thing, but Marilyn hadn't penetrated him either. Ian had unthinkingly done exactly what Marilyn had done -- ridden Charlie from on top.

Having Ian pin him down and fuck him would probably work as well as it always did. That day, though, Charlie didn't feel up to anything strenuous. He was tense and sore, and while undressing he hadn't been able to ignore the way his body was one big patchwork of bruises, from the newer purple-blue patches to the older yellow-green blotches. He could tell Ian was looking at them too, a muscle in his jaw clenching whenever his attempts to look Charlie in the eye -- pretending everything was fine -- failed.

Charlie missed Ian, missed sex with Ian, but right then, he didn't feel up to anything acrobatic. He slid down his lover's naked body and licked at Ian's hardening cock, then sucked down the whole length. He teased him for a few minutes, then when the curses and accusations of teasing shifted into a language Charlie was familiar with but didn't understand, he rotated, putting his own solid and aching cock within reach of Ian's mouth. Ian latched on with an enthusiasm that had Charlie grunting out a yelp, which made Ian laugh onto Charlie's cock, and the rest of the process went just fine.

Coming into Ian's mouth, and swallowing down Ian's own orgasm, blew the rest of the fuzz out of Charlie's brain.

Having slow, fun sex with Ian helped him reattach, at least some. Maybe re-ground was closer? Whatever it was, Charlie felt less like he was drifting and more like he was back in the real world, once they got up and sorted out their scattered clothes.

"Getting groceries," Ian called, heading for the front door.

"Groceries?" Charlie asked, following. "Is everything okay?" He had images of milk and eggs spoiling while they rolled around in bed, avoiding the edges and sudden falls to the floor, but when Ian let the tailgate down, Charlie saw that tucked under the tarp right there at the end, there was a big aluminum cooler in the back, along with a bunch of normal plastic grocery sacks.

"Always prepared," said Ian. "Even shopping in the nearest town, it's a long drive back, and it's usually pretty warm."

The sacks had mostly fallen over on the drive up. Charlie crawled in and set about repacking things while Ian muscled the cooler out and lugged it inside.

"I don't suppose you have wifi here?" Charlie asked, mostly teasing, when he followed with the full sacks.

"Matter of fact we do," said Ian. He'd unloaded the cooler, presumably into the antique-looking fridge in one corner, and was emptying ice packs into the sink. "It comes with the satellite service. And I mentioned before there's a cell tower on the ridge." He waved one hand toward the corner opposite the fridge; presumably the ridge with the cell tower was in that direction.

"Great!" Charlie helped unpack groceries, although his "help" mostly consisted of asking Ian where things went and then putting them there. Ian could probably have done it faster himself, but he didn't complain.

When they were done, Charlie had Ian write the wireless password down for him, then got out his laptop and checked his e-mail. Of course, there were four messages from Don, in increasing levels of terse worry, which Don communicated by making ever-escalating levels of threat. The last one, sent forty-eight minutes ago, said, "Turn on your damn phone! Or check your email, something! If you don't make contact within the next hour I swear I'm going to fly out there and shoot you myself."

Charlie smirked and hit Reply, typing out a quick note pointing out that Don's first two messages had been sent while Charlie was still in the air, and the third while they were on the road. The fourth had come while Ian was sucking him stupid, but Charlie decided to be a good brother and not mention that. He wrapped up with, "I'm fine, nice place, great sight lines," and sent it.

He turned on his phone, the new-to-him Bureau issued phone that was supposed to be clean, really for-reals, and saw eighteen messages from Don. He deleted them all, not wanting to listen to however many minutes' worth of worried ranting.

Don's reply pinged into his e-mail box four minutes later. "About time you got back to me. That airport has wifi so you could've checked in as soon as you landed. And you could've called from anywhere. You said you'd keep in touch and I'm holding you to that."

That got an eyeroll. "It's not like I had checked baggage," he wrote back. "We weren't about to stop in the middle of the airport while I got out my laptop and wrote you a letter. I didn't think to call, sorry. I'd just seen you a few hours earlier and didn't think you'd be hysterical quite that soon -- my apologies. I'll figure that into my model next time."

He smirked and hit "Send."

Poking his big brother made him feel a little better, so he went through the rest of his neglected e-mail and answered the ones that seemed vital. He let Millie know he'd moved out of the area in an attempt to keep from getting blown up again, and imagined her laughing at that while her eyes still showed worry. He promised to let her know as soon as he had any idea when he'd be back.

That was the one thing he still worried about. What if nothing happened? If Don's team never caught the bomber, and the bomber couldn't find Charlie, or didn't come to Arizona after him for some other reason, then what? Much as he loved Ian, Charlie couldn't imagine staying there at Ian's ranch forever. Ian couldn't do that either; he had his own job to do, and his time away from it had to be finite.

It was like waiting for a serial killer to commit another crime, to give you more data. In fact, it was _exactly_ like waiting for a serial killer to commit another crime; this particular serial killer was just... just making serial attempts, rather than serial murders. But still, Charlie always hated that part, even when he wasn't the target.

He went looking for Ian and found him in the kitchen, just sliding his phone back into his pocket.

"I let some neighbors know I'm home and that you're with me," he said. "I sent them a picture, so if someone you don't know waves, wave back."

"Umm, the bomber knows what I look like. I don't want to wave to someone who's trying to kill me."

Ian said, "If it's someone _I_ don't know, I'll be dragging your ass away as fast as possible, so you won't have time to worry about waving."

Charlie absorbed without commenting the assumption that Ian would be within arm's reach whenever they were someplace where they might encounter other people.

"I let folks know there might be an unfriendly stranger or two following us," Ian went on. "Rural people are very aware of who's in the neighborhood and when there are strangers around. It's better than a network of security cameras."

Images and models of real world social networks flashed through Charlie's mind, with accompanying mathematical descriptions streaming as a subchannel. He nodded and said, "Good, that'll help."

"It will," said Ian. Then he smirked and asked, "So, what'd your brother have to say? How many messages did he leave while we were in transit?"

Charlie grinned back. "Way too many. He thought I should've signed on to the airport wifi and answered his e-mails. I didn't even think about checking the phone he gave me, much less e-mail."

"I don't think you were checking in on this planet at that point," said Ian. "You were kind of out of it."

"I know," said Charlie. He looked away, his eyes scanning around the kitchen without really seeing anything. "Maybe still am? It's hard to tell."

"You're more here than you were." Ian came over and wrapped his arms around Charlie, pulling him close. Charlie leaned in, letting himself relax into the feel and scent of his lover.

"I'm trying," he said. "It's getting better."

"It is. There'll probably be times when it's worse again for a while. That's fine. Let me know what you need, even if it's to be left alone for a while."

"I hate this," Charlie whispered. He meant the whole thing, not just his detached, floating-apart-from-the-world feeling.

"Me too," said Ian. "But you've had a lot of shit happen to you. It takes time to recover."

"I know." And he did. It didn't make it any easier, knowing it was normal.

Funny how they used the word "normal" to describe a reaction to something that was way out of the norm. Getting kidnapped, raped, blown up -- none of that was _normal,_ but there was a "normal" way to respond to it all. As a mathematical norm it made sense, but when applied to horrible things happening to real people, happening to _him,_ it felt incredibly _ab-_ normal. Calling it "normal" was almost offensive, even knowing what Ian meant by it.

"I can hear your brain babbling," Ian whispered.

That made Charlie laugh, just a little and not very loud, but it was a laugh. "My brain can't help it," he said. "It babbles pretty much all the time."

"I know. It's kind of fascinating, being able to perceive your brain working from the outside. It's like you have so many huge thoughts zooming around in there, your head can't hold them all."

That got another laugh, a bit longer that time. "Thanks, I guess."

"Welcome," said Ian. "How about if you, your thoughts and I take a walk around the property? I want to check things out, see how things have changed."

"So you're more likely to recognize newer differences if anyone comes prowling around?"

"Exactly. Come on, Professor, let's go for a hike."

Charlie nodded and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. Ian slung his rifle case over his shoulder, locked the door behind them, then led him off up the driveway, back toward the road. They turned off onto a narrow dirt trail before hitting anything like pavement. Rough grasses grew to either side, spotted with other things, none of which Charlie could identify specifically. Some had tiny flowers on them in white or yellow or orange. Some had prickly little seeds; Charlie imagined the local dogs needed to be brushed pretty much every day to keep the burrs out of their fur.

A minute or so down the trail, Ian said, "I'm going to be mostly paying attention to what's out here. Your job is to keep an eye on the house. The land is clear around the house for at least a half mile in every direction and usually more, so someone would have to be running all out for at least a couple of minutes to make it there from cover. You don't have to walk backwards or anything, but glance over once or twice a minute, make sure no one's approaching while we're gone."

"Okay," said Charlie. The house was currently to the left and a bit behind; he looked and didn't see anything moving.

He did spot a squirrel by a rock a nearby, though. It was reddish grey, with a bushy tail. He watched it as they passed, trying to see what it was doing. Grooming its tail, maybe.

Ian noticed where he was looking and said, "Rock squirrel. They eat rattlesnakes."

Charlie laughed, until he noticed Ian wasn't. "Wait, seriously?"

"Tough-ass squirrels we have here," said Ian with a nod.

"What, did you teach them to shoot or something?"

That got a full-out laugh out of Ian. Charlie felt ridiculously pleased by that.

"Nope, no firearms for the wildlife. They mob the snakes -- gang up on them."

"Maybe I should've gathered the whole math department together and mobbed the bomber," said Charlie.

"You're not a squirrel, Charlie."

"No, it sounds like the squirrels are a lot tougher than I am."

He got a harder-than-usual shoulder bump for that. "Every animal does some things we can't. Every human can do a bunch of stuff an animal can't. We can learn from them, sure, but it's no reason to get all depressed."

"I have plenty of other reasons to get all depressed," Charlie said with a wry smile.

"And plenty of reasons not to," Ian pointed out. He didn't make a big deal of it beyond that, which Charlie knew his dad or his brother would've. He appreciated that.

They walked on for a few minutes, Charlie looking back at the house and the open pasture around it every half minute or so. They circled around to the line of hills beyond the back pasture, the trail leading them up a gentle slope and then along the crest for a stretch. Ian walked at a normal pace, not unusually fast but not carefully slow, either, his eyes scanning back and forth, occasionally pausing for a moment or two on something Charlie couldn't see.

He didn't ask. Maybe next time -- and he was pretty sure there'd be several next times. Ian was taking his baseline data set, though, and if Charlie introduced errors by distracting him, none of the subsequent scans would be valid.

Or so he assumed. Asking Ian about it right then might introduce an error, so he filed the question away for later.

Ian pointed out the cell tower, up on a higher chain of hills beyond the one they were walking. Charlie grinned and said, "I believed you. Aside from the fact that my phone worked."

"Just making sure," said Ian. "I know you like to see the evidence for yourself."

They stopped just before the trail sloped back down. Charlie sat on a rock and swigged water. They'd been out for a little over two hours. No one had tried to approach the house while they were gone. Not that he'd really expected anyone to show up -- unless the bomber was ridiculously lucky or superhumanly omnicient, he was still back in LA.

"How're you doing?" asked Ian.

"Great," Charlie said out of reflex. Then he amended it to, "Good enough. It's been a while since my last hike."

"And you've been blown up a couple of times since then. You're keeping up just fine, but sing out if you need a break. We're not on a schedule."

Charlie nodded and passed him the water bottle. Ian took a couple of swigs, then passed it back.

"There's a high pasture my granddad used in the summers," said Ian. "It's cooler up there, and there's a little cabin -- more of a shack -- that I liked to stay in when I was a kid. I'd pack up a blanket roll and food and my twenty-two and vanish into the hills for a week. My grandmother was just as happy to have me out from underfoot. Sometimes I had cousins with me, and sometimes not."

"Sounds like fun," said Charlie. His own childhood, learning to maneuver around older kids and then adults, had been scheduled and supervised, with his mother watching him like a mama bear, making sure he didn't get _too_ stressed and end up going the way of too many genius kids. The thought of disappearing into the hills for a week on his own sounded pretty awesome.

"For me, sure," said Ian. "Not so much for my grandmother. My dad was raised here, partially. He grew up cutting wood and helping with the sheep. Me and my cousins, we were raised in town for the most part, and it took some effort on my grandmother's part to get us to toe the line out here. More than it should've, really, but kids are like that."

"Wait, I thought you pretty much grew up out here? Where'd you learn all your leet tracking skillz, then?"

Ian smirked. "Oh, I'd come around by the time I was a teenager. Started following my grandfather around because I wanted to rather than because my grandmother threatened to take a hairbrush to me if I didn't. Even when I was a kid, though, you don't spend days on end in the hills on your own without learning a few things."

"I suppose," said Charlie.

"Ready to head out?" asked Ian.

"Sure." Charlie stood up and followed him up the trail.

About forty minutes later they came to a spot where two trails intersected in a big, bare Y at the base of a sandstone outcrop. The right hand branch wound higher up into the hills, while the left hand branch headed down; Charlie was pretty sure it was pointing toward the house or the road, that general direction. On a low stone shelf on the uphill side of the intersection, there was a small cairn of rocks, stacked in a rough pyramid about a foot high. A corner of a clear plastic bag stuck out from under it.

Ian frowned and stalked over to the cairn, and Charlie followed. Looking at the protruding corner, it didn't seem like the bag had been there for very long. Maybe a few days? It was still mostly shiny -- dusty, yes, but not weathered.

"I'm assuming that wasn't here last time you came by," said Charlie, eyeing the thing.

"No," said Ian. "The cairn is fresh. And I'm going to be really paranoid and ask you to step away. Down there--" Ian pointed at the left hand path, "--at least a dozen big steps. If anything happens, take that path. It'll lead you to the road. Go down the road about a mile, then take the right hand turn-off, past the wooden gate. Another half mile and you'll come to the Lamberts' place. Tell them what happened, and call Don. Stay there until he comes to get you."

Charlie stared at him, his eyes getting bigger and bigger as Ian spoke, his jaw clenching with anger and frustration. As if he'd just run and hide, and abandon Ian if there was any danger! "If you think anything's going to happen, we should both leave! If you get blown up, there's no way I'm leaving you!"

"I'm not expecting to get blown up," Ian said, his voice low and steady. "Look, there's obviously a letter in the plastic bag -- you can just see one corner of the paper. Whoever left this, whether it's your bomber or someone else, must want us to read it. I'm just being cautious. Now please, move away?"

Charlie glared, then nodded and stepped back. Ian waited, staring at him hard, until he was a good thirty feet away before he turned back to the cairn and started taking it apart. As he exposed more of the plastic bag, Charlie saw that there was indeed a piece of paper in it.

Charlie watched Ian tossing the rocks off to the side of the trail, one hand on the plastic bag, tugging, shoving rocks aside. His fists were clenched, and he felt his jaw tighten every time Ian removed a rock. His gut wound tighter and tighter, and he was so stressed that when a sudden BOOM! rumbled down from the ridge, he shouted in shock and jumped a good foot in the air.

"The cell tower." Ian glared up at it over his shoulder. Charlie turned and looked, saw the cloud of dust and smoke dissipating from around the wreckage of the tower. He pulled out his phone just for drill, but as expected there was no signal.

Ian turned back to the cairn and tossed aside rocks until the plastic was free, along with a flattish box with a pressure plate. It must've had a transmitter inside, like a dead man switch, set to go off when the weight on it reduced by a certain amount, rather than when it was completely exposed, so it would go off while still completely covered.

Ian picked up the plastic bag and pulled the zipper seal apart, slid the paper out. There was writing on it; Charlie trotted over and read over his shoulder.

_Edgerton,_

_Welcome home. I figured you'd bring your little professor here to hide eventually. He's very fragile, isn't he? It's been fun messing with you, but I'll enjoy watching your face when I finally kill him._

Ian tensed up, his muscles so tight Charlie was afraid he might sprain something. Charlie kneaded at his shoulder, trying to give some comfort, but it was almost an afterthought, his hand acting on automatic.

In his head, whole swathes of data fell away and graphs shifted. The focus of their search rotated and his mind clamored for more-more-more data! He needed information.

"I couldn't find him because he wasn't someone I knew, wasn't someone who hated me. He's after _you."_


	15. Chapter 15

**Ian**

"Thanks," said Ian, his voice a harsh rasp. "Rub it in a little more." Because of course he couldn't have figured out on his own that Charlie'd been blown up twice already and still had a target on his ass because of _him._

"Ian!" Charlie grabbed his shoulders with both hands and shook, his eyes wide and enthused. "We can find him now! We know what direction to look! This is great! We have more data, the key piece we need, and we didn't have to wait for another bomb to go off. Or, not one near people, anyway. Come on -- I need my laptop, and you need to start writing down every person _you_ might've pissed off. People who had the skills to do this."

He practically dragged Ian down the trail, babbling as he went, his usual excited, thinking-out-loud babbling that meant Professor Eppes was on the case and the engines were all revving. "I _told_ Don it couldn't be an academic! How many math professors are that skilled with explosives? But you've probably dealt with dozens of people like that. Now we can find him!"

Ian moved on automatic for a few paces until he realized which direction Charlie was dragging him, then he planted his feet. "No. Whoever it is, he'd expect us to go back to the house. If he knew about this place...." Ian scrubbed a hand through his hair, his other hand clenched solidly around Charlie's. "Hell, he could've been here the whole time. I thought we were safe here, I wasn't expecting anyone to find us for days if at all. He beat us here... hell, he could've been hiding in the attic all day because I didn't _look_ there--"

"Hey." Charlie got right up in his face and squeezed Ian's hand, his other hand grabbing one of Ian's shoulders and shaking hard. "Ian, focus. You didn't know. You had no way of knowing. Now we do know and we have to decide what to do. If you don't want to go back to the house, then what?"

Ian looked over his shoulder, then started hauling Charlie back up to the intersection. "Up. We're heading into the hills. Whoever it is, he might know I own this place, but there's no way he knows the land around here like I do."

"Camping, okay," said Charlie, trotting to keep up. "Umm, we're almost out of water, and we don't have any gear." He didn't slow down, was obviously just pointing out some facts.

"We'll stop at the cabin. There are blankets there. I have a couple of knives and my rifle. There's a spring up at the high pasture -- it's usually pure, and if it's not, we'll deal."

"Okay," said Charlie. "If it's a choice between getting blown up or a few parasites, I'll take the parasites."

Ian would usually have laughed at that, but he didn't have any laughter in him right then. He kept scanning the terrain, right and left, up and down, sure they were being watched. If so, there wasn't much he could do about it right then. There were some trees higher up, not thick enough for really good cover, but better than nothing. At the moment, the safest thing they could do was move.

And watch for trip wires. And pressure plates.

Although so long as he was right next to Charlie, they were probably safe. The bastard after them wanted Ian to watch Charlie die, and that wouldn't happen if they were blown up together.

So the thing to do right then was hang on to Charlie and keep going. Up the narrowing track, rain-rutted and winding up the side of the hill, through grass and scrub. And while they moved, while all Ian's senses strained for any sign that they were being watched or followed, part of his brain sifted through old cases, old targets, looking for bombers.

He couldn't remember every case, every hunt -- he needed a computer and an internet connection for that, or at least a working phone and some time -- but he did the best he could with what was in his head about bombers he'd put away or taken out. Carter was in prison and not due to get out for another eighteen years, or maybe six if he worked the parole board just right. Jergen was dead, and Frayne, and O'Neil, and Markov.... Belker was in prison and only had one hand now -- he might have a friend or a brother who'd want revenge. Any of the dead ones, the targets who'd kept running, kept shooting or triggering bombs, the ones who'd left him no option but to shoot them -- any of them might have vengeful relatives.

Probably not just a friend. Whoever it was, whoever wanted to see Ian's face when they killed Charlie, had a personal grudge, a serious hate-on for Ian, moreso than just offing a buddy or a really good partner in crime would usually cause. It was probably a close family member, a lover, even a girlfriend or wife, because while they'd all been thinking "he" there were women who were good with explosives too, even though the odds said male.

And actually, the person Ian had locked up or taken down might not've been a bomber. A shooter or a kidnapper might have a brother who was into explosives.

Shit.

"Charlie, I need help."

"Anything," said Charlie. Ian heard that he was slightly out of breath and considered slowing down, then decided not to. Charlie could keep going at their current pace for a while, and getting away from the bomb site, away from the house, as fast as possible was their best option.

"I'm not used to this data slicing thing," he said. "It seems like the bomber could be related to any case I've ever had. It might be a bomber I've locked up or taken out, but it might be someone who's good with bombs who's close to a shooter or kidnapper. I don't have enough data in my head to consider every family member and associate. I don't even know where to start, or if we have any chance at all of figuring it out without access to the Bureau's files."

Charlie hiked beside him, silent for a minute, while Ian kept watching all around, behind, above....

"This feels personal," Charlie said, echoing Ian's earlier thought. "Whoever's doing it, you either hurt them really badly -- justified, I'm sure, but still, from their point of view they owe you a lot of hurt in return -- or you hurt someone they were very close to. It's probably not just a... a fellow gang member or something."

Ian nodded, he'd figured that much out on his own, but Charlie went on.

"Another factor is that they're _here._ Whoever it is, they know _you_ well enough to know you own property here. A random crook with a grudge wouldn't know that, would they? Is this where you live when you're between cases?"

"No," Ian said, with a quick headshake. "I have an apartment near Quantico. I'm hardly ever there, but that's where the bills go."

"Okay, then. It's someone who knows you well enough to know of an old place that's been in your family for a while, but where you hardly ever go. It's not your primary residence, so they wouldn't find it just by hunting through your mail or your garbage.

Ian stopped.

Just for a moment. He looked up the trail, where the summer cabin lay almost a mile away as the crow flies. Back down the trail, where the house was about a mile and a half away, but downhill. Which way?

"I know who it is," he said. He started up the slope again, still holding tight to Charlie's hand. He wasn't sure he was heading in the right direction, but whether you were hunting or hunted, you made a decision and then acted on it; standing frozen in one place got you dead.

"Who?" Charlie scrambled to keep up with him, and was still doing pretty well.

"A guy named Joe Branson. We served together. Then I went to sniper school and he went into ordinance. We wrote some, called some, spent a couple of leaves together, when we were in the same hemisphere. I had him here at the ranch once."

He kept looking around while he spoke, twice as tense as he'd been five minutes ago.

"His little brother joined the service too, but not like we did. It was one of those join-up-or-go-to-prison things."

Look uphill, downhill, check the ridges and gullies, scan underbrush looking for breaks in the non-pattern of the foliage....

After a few seconds, Charlie said, "I take it that didn't work in his case?"

"It doesn't work in a lot of cases, actually. But no, it didn't work in Eli's case. He came out just as much of a violent punk as he went in, except he was better with weapons and tactics. He shot his girlfriend, then went on a spree. He wouldn't surrender and I was the closest sniper." He paused, then said, "I actually aimed for his arm. Tried to, anyway. Stupid. But he twitched and he ended up with a hole the size of a fist through one lung."

Study the trail, scan the hillside, check the ridge, watch the shadows. "Joe never forgave me. But it was... almost six years ago. I watched my back for the next year or so, but I wasn't expecting anything out of him after this long."

They hiked in silence for another minute, then Ian added, "He was a good guy. A good soldier. Then he went into law enforcement. Last I heard anything about him, he was a sheriff in some little town in northern Oregon, doing a good job at it." He paused again, checking their six, then said, "I got a couple of calls for his area over the last few years. Always passed. Didn't think it was fair to make him work with me after what happened."

They were silent for a few seconds, then Charlie said, "That's reasonable." His voice was a little breathy, but he wasn't gasping. Ian lengthened his stride some. He really wanted to get to the cabin as soon as they could, pick up blankets, anything else useful that might still be there, and then go off trail. The nearest neighbors would be watched, might be watched, and he didn't want to bring any shit down on their heads. But there were a couple of other ranch houses on the far side of the ridge. Off trail, with Charlie, they could probably make it by the next afternoon. Even if no one was there, either house should have a landline, they could call Don, let him know who was behind all this, aim him in the right direction....

The last couple miles of trail went by in silence, just footsteps crunching against pebbles and swishing through grass, heavier breaths from Charlie as he struggled to keep up with Ian's pace on the slope. Ian made himself ignore it all and keep going. Branson had to know by now that they weren't heading for the house, so it was a race to the cabin, and they couldn't afford to slow down for Charlie so long as he wasn't in real distress.

He just hoped Branson hadn't already rigged it to blow.

No, he wouldn't have. He wanted to see Ian's face, wanted to torture him by torturing Charlie. He'd be looking to capture, not to kill from a distance.

But a small bomb, that was a possibility. He'd already shown he could finesse a bomb to just the magnitude he needed to accomplish his goal. So a smaller bomb, just enough to knock them silly and let him move in for a grab? Maybe.

The cabin finally appeared over the crest of the hill. Ian stopped and looked all around. There was no one visible, and no cover for less than a quarter mile in any direction, and usually more. Except for the trail they'd just covered, which disappeared below the crest a dozen paces behind where Ian was standing, where Charlie'd just come to a panting halt.

"I'm going to go into the cabin and get what we need," he said. "I need you to go back to where you can see our backtrail and watch, make sure he's not coming up behind us. Two or three times per minute, look all around, then back to watching the trail. All right?"

Charlie nodded once, short and jerky. He reached up to grab Ian's collar, yanked his head down for a quick kiss, and said, "Be careful," his voice breathy and short. Then he turned and limped back down the trail.

Ian watched until Charlie paused just where the land started to plunge downward, then he turned and jogged to the cabin.

The place leaned a little more, and the wood was weathered a paler grey, but that wasn't surprising. Ian hadn't been up there for a few years, and the weather got harsh over the winters. There'd been no particular reason to come up and work on it, not since the last of the sheep were sold off back when Ian was still in the service. Since then, the only people to use the place were the family kids on wide-spread vacation trips, who thought the run-down atmosphere of the tiny cabin was part of the fun.

Ian slowed down when he got within about a dozen feet of the place, studying the door, the trail leading up to it, the eaves -- looking for any sign that the place had been tampered with, any wires or triggers or even a camera. He didn't see anything. The place was coated in a film of dirt, but that got renewed every afternoon when the wind picked up; short of actual shining windows, it'd be tough to tell if anything had been disturbed.

No footprints. No crushed grass, no fresh breaks in the scrubby bushes clinging to the foundation.

He reached out slowly and pressed the door latch, a millimeter at a time, feeling for any resistance that might signal a trigger mechanism. Nothing.

A push sent the door swinging open on creaky hinges, and a buzzing noise sounded out of the dark inside the building. Ian jumped back, reaching over his shoulder for his rifle with all his attention straining to penetrate the shadows past the door, when something solid connected with the back of his head. Fireworks exploded in front of his eyes, and then nothing.


	16. Chapter 16

**Charlie**

A hollow thwack! had Charlie spinning around, eyes wide. He saw a guy who had to be Branson standing over Ian, who was sprawled on the ground, unmoving.

Conflicting instincts -- one to run to Ian and try to help, the other knowing he couldn't help and wanting to run away so the guy couldn't use him _against_ Ian -- held him in place long enough for the guy to look up at him, point a pistol at Ian's head and call, "Come join the party, Professor."

Charlie stared, his brain zipping between odds and possibilities, before he realized there wasn't anything he could do, at least not right then. While he stood there, the guy moved his gun to point at Ian's leg and said, "I'm getting impatient."

Yeah, he could do a lot of damage without killing. Charlie started walking.

"Nice to meet you up close, Professor," the guy said. "You're looking a little beat up." He said that last with a smirking grin and Charlie glared at him.

Charlie's pride screamed at him to stand up straight, stop limping, glare right in the guy's eye and not let him see how much damage he'd done. His brain -- the part of him that knew odds and game theory and human behavior -- told him not to give up that advantage. An image flashed into his mind of Branson underestimating him, letting his guard down because he thought Charlie wasn't any threat.

He glared at the guy anyway, but didn't bother hiding his fear, his worry, the pain throbbing through his body, which had been feeling abused long before the fast trot up a long, steep trail. He straightened his shoulders, but let all the ache and fatigue show in his body language, and in his voice when he said, "A little," and walked up to where he had a close-up view of the asshole aiming a pistol at Ian.

"A little," the guy said, his voice mocking. "You got some spunk, I'll give you that. If Edgerton was gonna turn into a pansy, I guess he could'a picked worse to do it with."

"You think he's a pansy? Is that why you hit him from behind?"

"I ain't stupid. No reason to take stupid chances." He nudged Ian's shoulder with the toe of his boot, then said, "Edgerton's not stupid either. He figure out who I was?"

"If you're Branson, then yes, he did."

That got him a grin. "Good. I want him to know why this is happening."

"You can't blame Ian for doing his job," Charlie said. "Your brother was killing people, he had--"

"Edgerton could've winged him!" shouted Branson, suddenly scowling, all his superior humor gone in a blink. "Edgerton could hit one leg off a fly from a klick away, and he'd let you pick which leg! Eli needed help, not a body bag!"

"He was killing people." Charlie made himself look Branson in the eye. "Was he strong enough to keep shooting with a bullet in his arm or leg?"

Branson snarled and reached out, grabbed Charlie's collar and threw him into the open doorway of the dark, rickety looking cabin. Charlie's whole body impacted with the hard-packed dirt floor, and a shock of pain went through every existing ache in his body like a wave.

A hard boot drove into his calf, and he scrambled across the floor and into the corner next to a narrow cot, just a wooden platform big enough for a sleeping bag. His hand came down on something plastic that rolled out from under him, sending him thudding down again with a jolt that made his ribs and shoulder ache. It was a plastic car, about fifteen inches long, the kind that worked by radio control. It was too clean to have sat there for years; Branson must've brought it. But why...?

Then Charlie thought of the buzzing sound it'd make when it moved. A strange, out-of-place sound in the dark of the cabin, something that'd draw Ian's attention just long enough for Branson to slip up behind him and clock him with the butt of his gun. Charlie'd wondered how he'd gotten the drop on Ian; the car explained it.

Right then, Branson had Ian by the back of the collar and dragged his limp body just inside, dumping him next to the door.

Charlie curled up in his corner, shoving the car under the cot, and watched Branson tug Ian's rifle case off his shoulder and pull the weapon out. At the same time, Charlie looked around the cabin, quick looks between Branson and the other cot opposite the one Charlie leaned against, between the droop of Ian's head and the hinged wooden chest next to Charlie's knee, which probably contained the blankets Ian had meant to fetch, between Branson checking the load and the iron and glass lamp bolted to the board wall behind the chest.

A plain black pack sat on a sturdy, square wooden table in the corner of the front wall. It was big enough to sit on, and looked heavy enough to support a grown man and then some, but right then all it had on it was the backpack, which had to be Branson's, sagging and empty looking now without the car in it.

Branson aimed Ian's rifle and Charlie shouted, his heart slamming in his chest, throwing himself across the room, too late, too slow. His knee flared and sent him knocking against the back of Branson's thighs, too late to even throw his aim off. Luckily he hadn't been aiming at Ian.

No, of course not. He said he wanted Ian to suffer. If he was going to shoot Ian in the head, he'd have done it a long time ago.

Instead he shot a hole in the board wall, to one side of Ian's head, right next to the doorjamb. Daylight shone through it, making the dust in the air dance and swirl.

And the black pack wasn't empty. Branson smirked down at Charlie and kicked him back toward his corner, then picked up the pack. It gave a metallic rattle, and he pulled two sets of handcuffs and a length of heavy chain out of it.

One cuff of each set went onto Ian's wrists, then Branson fed the chain through the hole. He wrapped it around the doorjamb -- a heavy wooden beam at least eight inches square that wasn't going anywhere short of a bull dozer, a heavy saw, or a serious earthquake -- then closed the second cuff on each set to either end of the chain, effectively chaining Ian to the post by his wrists. The door wouldn't close with the chain running through it, but no one was going to hear anything up there in the hills, and Charlie doubted Branson cared about the cold come nightfall. He didn't even know whether he and Ian would be alive when the sun set.

Charlie half expected Don and the team to come diving in through the door, but he knew that was just fantasy. Don was hours away at best, and had no idea what was going on.

It's no use wishing for a rescue, Charlie thought. His mind felt like it was revved up to turbo mode, but it was just revving and not going anywhere. He watched Branson give Ian's wrists a jerk, making sure everything was secure, and knew he had to think of something, come up with something, some idea or trick or a way of persuading Branson to let them go.

That wasn't going to happen.

Branson was grieving for his brother and he wasn't interested in reason. Charlie could understand that, on an intellectual level. If someone killed Don, Charlie was pretty sure he'd want revenge. He wasn't the kind of person who could kill someone else even under those circumstances, but the impulse would be there.

"Let's just make sure, shall we?" said Branson, his voice heavy with satisfaction. He gave Charlie a grin over his shoulder, then pulled his pistol out of its holster under one arm.

"Wait, no, I'm no threat to you, please--!"

"Ain't going to shoot _you,_ Professor. You're right, you're no threat to me. Edgerton, though, he's a threat. Even like this. I watch movies, same as everyone. You turn your back on the bad guy and no matter how secure you had him, he's off and escaping, or slipping around to knife you in the ribs."

He cocked his pistol and turned back to Ian.

"No! Wait, don't! That's fiction, he's _chained up,_ he can't do anything, please don't--!"

While Charlie scrambled to his feet, babbling and pleading, Branson put the muzzle of the pistol right up against the back of Ian's right hand, where it hung limp in its cuff, and pulled the trigger.

Ian jerked and let out a low yell, like a scream escaping through a barely-cracked door. Branson swung out with his free arm and knocked Charlie into the wall without even looking, like he'd known exactly what Charlie was going to do.

Charlie saw Ian's face draw into a tight, pained grimace, and his eyes flutter slightly, his arms jerking at the cuffs and one leg kicking out, a blind attempt to strike out at what'd hurt him.

The hole in his palm was ragged and bloody, and two of the fingers pointed out at odd angles.

While Charlie stared in shock at Ian's blood streaming down his arm, Branson yelled, "Shut up!" and backhanded Charlie across the face with his pistol. Only then, while bouncing hard off the wooden frame of the bunk once more, did Charlie realize his throat was feeling raw, that he was screaming.

He closed his mouth and immediately opened it again. He barely made it to his hands and knees before he vomited his breakfast all over the dirty wooden floor.

Before Charlie could even think about anything beyond his stomach and what was coming out of it, an arm around his throat made him gag even harder. He was yanked upright and swung around in Branson's grip, the barrel of that damn pistol pressed against his arm.

Of course his arm. Branson wasn't about to kill him right away and everyone in that shack knew it.

Charlie's feet scraped helplessly at the floor, his toes straining to reach, to take some of the pressure off his jaw where he hung in Branson's arm. His hands flailed up and clutched, trying to pry the arm off or at least loosen it a little. He gasped for a breath of air, then heaved, then gasped, then heaved again. Nothing came up, but he wished it had, just so he could vomit on Branson.

He heard a choking gasp and tried to push the focus of his attention out beyond himself, his screaming lungs and twisting stomach and burning throat, to the wall by the door where Ian was jerking in his chains. His jaw was clenched and his eyes were slitted. His good hand was a tight fist and the other one was a splash of red, barely visible against the bloodied wall.

"Back with us, Edgerton?"

The sneer in Branson's voice pissed Charlie off even more. He thought to kick backwards, hard, and his heel impacted the man's shin. That got him a curse and a shake and the butt of a gun slammed against his temple.

The world spun for some unknown amount of time while angry voices roared past him in an unintelligible smear of harsh sound.

Charlie pulled his awareness back into himself, and focused on just hanging there, relaxing as well as he could. So long as he struggled, Branson would keep choking him and hitting him. The guy'd been in the military, there was no way Charlie could take him down, and he wouldn't be able to do anything at all if he was choked till he passed out.

So instead he relaxed, conserving his air, and focused on putting out a Completely Helpless And Docile aura.

It took what seemed like a lot longer than it probably was, but eventually Branson relaxed his chokehold enough for Charlie to take a cautious breath, then another. When the fog started clearing out of his mind, he turned his attention away from his straining throat and his slamming heart and back to what was going on around him.

He forced his eyes to focus and the first thing he saw was Ian. His mangled hand hung limp at his side, but he was on his feet and his left hand was tugging at the cuff locked around it. His eyes locked onto Charlie's for a moment, then glared over Charlie's shoulder.

"So he's awake," said Branson, his voice loud in Charlie's ear, punctuated with a quick, hard shake. "That better or worse, do you think?"

"I think it doesn't matter," said Ian. "I think you're stage managing this show and you don't care what I think. I think you're a coward who was too terrified to come after me directly--"

"You think I'm stupid?" Branson shouted. "I'm in control here and I'm not dumb enough to let you talk me into a 'fair' fight. You didn't give Eli a fair fight -- just shot him from a quarter mile out -- so you don't deserve one either."

"Did Eli give Missy Fielding a fair chance?"

"Shut up!" Branson dragged Charlie with him across the floor and gave Ian a vicious kick in one knee. Ian grunted in pain and collapsed to the floor. He sat there in an awkward sprawl, his injured hand twisted in its cuff and his face drawn into a hard, pained mask.

"Eli was sick!" Branson raged. "Eli needed help, he needed to be brought in, sent to a hospital! You didn't have to kill him!"

"I aimed for his arm!"

"Liar! You're a crack shot, a wizard with a rifle, everyone knows it! You hit exactly what you aimed at!"

"I'm not that good!" Ian snapped, his voice breathy with pain. "Nobody's that good! I miss sometimes!"

"Bullshit excuses!" Branson kicked again, and Ian just managed to twist aside enough to take the boot of Branson's boot in his thigh instead of in his knee.

The knee that looked like it was swelling already, from what Charlie could see through Ian's worn jeans. If Branson's boots had steel toes, it might be broken, and even if they got away somehow, Ian wouldn't be able to run, or even walk, so--

"You're afraid of what I'm gonna do to your pretty little boyfriend here, you'd say anything! You'd lie through your teeth--!"

"I would, but I don't have to! I didn't want to kill him! He was a murdering little punk, but I didn't want to kill him! I never _want_ to kill anyone!"

"Fucking liar!" Another kick landed, this time on Ian's shin. Charlie was sure he heard something crack and he couldn't help jerking in Branson's grip, but the man was crazy-angry and just tightened his arm around Charlie's throat for a few seconds, otherwise ignoring him.

"You're a liar!" he repeated. "Nobody gets that good at something unless they love doing it! All the guys who look up to you, who worship at your feet, they all know you're a killer. It's what you love doing and you're better at it than anyone! That's why we joined the Service, so we could kill for our country and not go to prison for it!"

Ian stared and shook his head. "You're actually crazy," he said, his voice low and tense. He looked like he'd just figured something out and wasn't happy about it. Charlie knew exactly how he felt, because he suddenly felt like his stomach had turned into lead.

It looked like it wasn't only the younger Branson brother who liked killing. Eli just hadn't been as good at hiding his sickness.


	17. Chapter 17

**Ian**

His hand hurt, a burning agony like someone had shoved a glowing-hot poker through it. He had some vague idea that he should clench his fist, try to minimize the blood loss, but the pain made any deliberate movement of his hand impossible. He'd tried it once and almost passed out.

He couldn't do that again. He had to stay awake, couldn't leave Charlie alone with Branson.

Part of his mind was poring through every memory of Branson, trying to figure out where this vicious hatred had come from. Anyone would be angry when a brother got killed, that was normal. But this? This was insane, and Branson's insistence that he'd joined the Service just so he could kill people sort of explained it.

Sort of.

But how could anyone possibly keep that twisted attitude a secret for years?

And hindsight was definitely twenty-twenty, because as soon as he said out loud that Branson was crazy, Ian regretted it.

Branson snarled something vile and kicked at Ian, hard. Ian tried to twist away, tried to raise a leg, catch the kick on the sole of his boot, or at least one of the bigger muscles of his thigh or calf, but his reflexes were shot to hell, every movement made the hot poker in his hand flare up again, and he was struggling to stay conscious when the solid toe of Branson's boot hit him low in the ribs.

A yelp of pain escaped before Ian could clamp down on it.

Charlie jerked in Branson's grip and got a crack across his skull with the pistol.

"Your brother was a murderer," Ian shouted, determined to get Branson's attention off Charlie and back onto himself. "He was a rabid dog and needed to be put down."

It worked. Branson flung Charlie away, and Ian winced as he watched him bounce off the wall and onto the wooden bunk. Then Branson was up in his face, with the pistol jammed against his forehead.

Adrenaline flashed through his body, and Ian was pretty sure he'd have been able to punch Branson through the roof if he'd been free.

He wasn't free, though, so all he could do was glare up at the asshole, every muscle stretched taut. "Do it," he said. "Kill me."

Ian was pretty sure he wouldn't do it. He'd said he wanted to stretch it out, wanted to make Ian suffer. Wanted to make him watch Charlie die, slowly. Blowing Ian's brains out would make that tough to accomplish.

Ian didn't want to die, but even more he didn't want to leave Charlie alone with a crazed maniac. But he didn't know what to do, had no plan except trying to keep Branson's attention on him. But that was just a stopgap and Ian knew it.

He kicked out as hard as he could and clipped Branson's knee, but the guy was fast and managed to twist away from most of the force of the blow. Ian got another kick for that, and his ability to dodge was a lot less right then.

Focusing on the hole in his hand, which was still dribbling blood down his arm, Ian hardly felt anything else.

Branson leaned in to bellow at him, but Ian ignored him, which wasn't tough with the buzz of pain filling his mind. He kept his head down a little and didn't make eye contact, just let the guy holler. Ian's focus, out of the corner of his eye, was on Charlie.

Charlie'd ended up wrapped around one edge of the bunk, and was slowly peeling himself away from it. From the way he moved, Ian guessed he had at least a cracked rib, maybe a break. He was moving slowly, deliberately, and his breathing was quick and shallow.

Part of Ian's brain was screaming at him to protect Charlie, but he couldn't, and it was killing him. There was nothing he could do to keep Branson from doing whatever he wanted to Charlie. There was no way he could get out of the cuffs without a key, and they were looped around one of the old, hardwood timbers that supported the shack. Despite everyone calling it a "shack," the place had been built to last through summer and storm, and even with a saw it'd take some time to get through the upright.

Ian was staying where he was, and that was the end of it.

The best he could do was try to distract Branson away from Charlie, but that was just a holding action and he knew it. There was nothing Ian could do to bring about an endgame, at least not one he was willing to consider. He might be able to taunt Branson into killing him, but then he'd kill Charlie. Leaving a witness would be stupid, and Branson might be crazy, but he wasn't stupid.

If anyone was going to do anything to get them out of this, it'd have to be Charlie, and Ian didn't know if Charlie was up to it. Charlie had heart, and enough smarts for four or five people, but this wasn't the kind of situation you could plug into an equation.

Charlie slid to his knees on the floor, leaning over the edge of the bunk, panting. He didn't look up, and the one hand Ian could see was trembling.

A sudden silence brought Ian's attention back to Branson, who'd just finished a rant or something. Ian didn't want him checking on Charlie, so he just snarled up at the guy and kicked at him with one foot. He aimed at his knee, but knew he couldn't hit it and sure enough, he came up short. Branson laughed and kicked back.

"That all you have left? Big, tough sniper, kicking at shins like a little kid in a schoolyard?" And then the muzzle of the pistol was right _there,_ weaving between Ian's nose and his heart and his other hand, then back to aim at his left eye and it was like looking down into a pit that went on forever until there was a shout and Charlie hurled himself onto Branson's gun arm.

All Ian could do was yell and cuss and jerk his cuffs, watching while Branson beat Charlie back. It couldn't have been more than ten seconds before it was over. The pistol was back in its holster, Charlie was pinned against Branson's chest, and the tip of a knife was pressing against Charlie's cheek, right beside his nose. It was a boning knife, the kind of blade a hunter would use to get the meat off a carcass after a kill. Branson could take Charlie apart with that knife, literally.

Charlie was hyperventilating, his eyes huge and scared and pinned to the sharp point that he probably couldn't see. A trickle of blood ran down his cheek.

"I will _feed_ you that knife," Ian snarled. He knew he couldn't do shit, that it was just anger escaping, but he couldn't not say it, couldn't not say something, anything, anything that _might_ get Branson to leave off, or at least pull him back to being mad at Ian.

Except he already _was_ mad at Ian, that was the whole fucking problem.

"You won't do shit except watch," said Branson with an evil smirk. "Feel free to keep spitting threats, though. It feels good to know how much this gets to you."

He shifted the knife out to the center of Charlie's cheek and drew a thin, red line all the way to his jaw.

Charlie held still -- which was smart -- tense and panting, glaring as well as he could at Branson's hand as it moved. Ian shouted curses in eight languages, desperate to get Branson's focus back on him, but the fucker was absorbed in carving on Charlie and only gave Ian a occasional smirk over his shoulder.

When Branson started pulling Charlie's shirt off, Charlie bolted for the door. Branson lunged after him, and Ian managed to thrust out a foot to trip the bastard. Charlie made it outside, and Ian shouted, "Run! Run! Go, Charlie!" even while knowing Charlie wasn't going to make it.

Charlie was in good shape, but Branson was crazy, and that kind of whack-job rage gave you extra speed and focus.

Ian twisted around, ignoring the white-hot pain in his hand, desperate to see out the door.

He couldn't see Charlie; Branson was between them. Ian could only see Branson galloping down the trail. He was almost up to the crest, where the trail turned down and headed back toward the house, when Branson made a flying tackle and went down in a tumble with Charlie, a twisting-flailing-shouting struggle of desperation and anger.

Branson won, of course.

Ian saw Charlie take a couple of punches, then heard some sharp words he couldn't make out. Charlie lay on the ground despite slaps and kicks, and finally Branson heaved him up and slung him over one shoulder before hiking back to the cabin.

At first, Ian thought Charlie was unconscious, and his heart slammed in his chest. Maybe Branson had gone too far, he'd been angry and hit or kicked him too hard, maybe Charlie cracked his head on a rock, maybe he was dead...?

When Branson stomped back into the shack, he walked right through Ian, sending him off balance to the floor with an agonizing jerk to his holed hand. Branson dumped Charlie's body back down onto the dirt floor, and Ian's heart stopped for a moment when he saw Charlie was not only alive but conscious, and glaring up at Branson.

"Stubborn little bastard," Branson snarled, giving Charlie another kick in the ribs.

"You're going to kill me anyway," Charlie snapped back. "I'm not going to make your life easier. You want me moved, you can move me."

"Next time I'll kick you the whole way."

"You want to wear yourself out, go ahead."

That time the kick was aimed at his skull. Charlie ducked and threw his arms up, and Ian heard the sharp sound of the boot impacting Charlie's forearm. Charlie cried out, Ian yelled, and Branson dropped to his knees, straddling Charlie's thighs.

"It's almost like you're trying to convince me you're more trouble than you're worth. Is that it, Professor? You trying to get me to kill you faster?"

"You're just mad that I'm not grovelling and begging." Charlie's voice was thin and breathy, but with a solid note of steel in it. Ian didn't know whether to be proud of him or shout at him to do whatever the asshole wanted.

"Begging would be nice," said Branson, pulling his knife out again. "But I can make you scream and that's just as good.

Charlie swung both fists at him, but Branson grabbed him, pinned both wrists over his head with one hand, and bent down with the knife in his free hand. Ian couldn't see much besides Charlie's legs and Branson's back, but he heard fabric parting and then Charlie hissing in pain.

Ian gritted his teeth and stayed silent, his thoughts racing. No one knew they were there. No one would be coming. Someone would get up to inspect the destroyed cell tower eventually, but that was more than a mile away. Eppes would worry when he didn't hear from Charlie, but after their brangle over Charlie not answering his phone while he was in transit, Don would probably figure Charlie was just ignoring him for a while. He'd ignore Charlie back, then get mad, then get worried.

By when? Tomorrow? The next day?

Ian was pretty sure even tomorrow would be too late.

Charlie screamed and his legs convulsed. Branson made a pleased noise, half hum and half laugh, then looked over his shoulder.

"You getting this, Edgerton? No? Oh, sorry, you should have a better view."

He wrestled Charlie around until Ian could see most of him, his right side anyway. His still-kicking feet were shoved under the right bunk, and Branson had him pinned to the floor again.

Charlie's shirt hung in rags from his arms, and blood dripped off his chest, falling to the floor in spattering drops. There was too much hair on Charlie's chest for Ian to tell exactly where he'd been cut, but there was enough blood to get Ian's heart slamming.

"Okay, you've made your point! I'm the one you're pissed at, I get it! You want to hurt me, so hurt me!"

Branson gave him a smirk and said, "I am," before carving a long curve from Charlie's shoulder to his hip.

Ian threw back his head and screamed out of sheer frustration, pain, anger. He felt light-headed and struggled to focus his eyes. Blood still trickled down his arm, and half his shirt clung to his body, sticky and clammy.


	18. Chapter 18

**Charlie**

Charlie'd given up on the whole silent-and-stoic thing. He'd tried to tough it out, keep his mouth shut, not only to make things easier for Ian -- which sounded messed up, because "easier" implied that there was any easiness at all in this situation, which there totally wasn't -- but also for himself. He had some pride, and was hanging onto it with both hands. He might not stomp around grunting like some macho Neanderthal, but everyone had a backbone and he didn't want to give Branson the satisfaction of thinking he was weak. Or something.

But at the same time, there was that other part of him telling him he was being stupid, that having Branson underestimate him was probably their only chance of getting out of this mess.

He _knew_ that. He had to keep reminding himself, because his pride was stupid and was going to get him killed. Sooner. He _should_ look weak, should keep reinforcing the idea that Branson had absolutely nothing to worry about from Charlie's direction.

Then Branson started actually using the knife, and it became a moot point, because Charlie couldn't have kept quiet no matter how hard he tried.

Charlie's chest was on fire with pain, covered in blood. Branson had made it down to his belly. Charlie felt the sharp edge of the knife slicing through him, parting his flesh inch by inch, ripping a path of pain through him. He was sure his intestines were going to come sliding out any second, and he felt like he was about to vomit around all the crying and screaming, and he was so afraid he finally turned his head to look at Ian.

He hadn't wanted to look at Ian, hadn't wanted to make that connection, to make Ian look him in the eyes and see how much he was hurting. He'd told himself he'd be strong and get through it alone, but he couldn't do it anymore. Charlie felt like shit about it, really didn't want to compound the pain for both of them, but he just couldn't do this by himself anymore, he _needed_ Ian, even if it was just some eye contact.

So he turned his head and looked at Ian, still dangling from the doorpost in handcuffs, and saw that his eyes were closed.

Mostly closed. Ian's head was tilted down, like he couldn't hold it up anymore. His arm and chest were soaked in blood from the bullet hole in his hand, and his chest was barely moving.

He was obviously in shock, and barely conscious.

Charlie coughed out a laugh.

Branson smirked up at him and asked, "Having fun?"

"You lose," Charlie whispered, his voice a low rasp through a raw throat. "Ian's escaped."

Branson jumped to his feet and spun around, crouched like he was ready to take off after a fleeing victim, but then he stood up straight and glared down at Ian. Then he turned and kicked Charlie in the hip.

"The fuck did you think you'd accomplish with that bullshit?"

"He escaped," Charlie repeated. "You let him keep bleeding. He's unconscious. Nothing you do to me can hurt him anymore."

"Motherfucker--" Branson whirled around again and kicked Ian in the leg, slapped his face, shouted at him to wake the fuck up.

Charlie sucked in air, his breaths short and shallow, trying not to move... well, _anything,_ any more than he absolutely had to. But at the same time, he knew this was a chance, probably his only chance. Branson was distracted, was focused on Ian, didn't think Charlie was any kind of a threat.

He probably wasn't, but he had to try. He looked around -- heavy wooden bunks, toy car under one of them, chest with (probably) blankets in it, table with a backpack on it, the backpack Branson had brought the car in, probably any other gear he thought he might need. Maybe a backup gun? Another knife? A tool, something Charlie could use as a weapon?

Charlie pushed at the dirt floor with his hands, gritting his teeth against the pain and forcing his way through it silently by sheer will, lifted his butt up an inch or so and levered himself over, watching Branson's back the whole time. As quiet as he could, focused on controlling his breathing, he moved, a bit at a time, edging toward the backpack.

He made it almost halfway before Branson stood up, then rounded on him. "Where the fuck you going?"

Charlie glared up at him and said, "As far away from you as I can get." He tried for strong and defiant, but his voice came out sounding more rough and scared. Fine, whatever.

Branson glared at Charlie, looked in the direction he'd been heading, and snorted. He stepped over to the backpack, fished around in it. Brought out a pistol, waved it at Charlie and stuck it into the back of his pants. Held up a hank of rope, displayed it, tossed it back in. A bottle of water, a couple of energy bars. Everything was dropped back into the pack.

"Give you credit for trying, Professor. You might have a ball in your pants somewhere." He picked Charlie up under his arms and gave him a hard shake that made Charlie bite his tongue. He tasted blood. "But you're a soft little fag and I'm a soldier. _Don't_ piss me off."

With another shake, Branson threw him at the useless backpack. Charlie bounced off the wall and crashed onto the floor along with the backpack and the table, not bothering to stifle the pained noises he couldn't help making, collecting new bruises and possibly another cracked bone or three. Hopefully only cracks.

Charlie pushed aside the thought of how much soft tissue damage he'd gotten in the last hour, on top of the damage already there from the explosions over the last... how many days? Too many. Not enough. He didn't care.

The edge of the table was digging into his belly and Charlie pushed away from it, got up onto his knees.

A look told him that Branson was smacking Ian again, trying to get him conscious. He was back to ignoring Charlie, or seemed to be. Charlie didn't have to be caught twice to learn a lesson, though. Branson _was_ a soldier, or had been, and he'd have... what was it Ian called it? Situational awareness. He wouldn't completely ignore what was going on around him, no matter how focused he seemed to be on Ian.

Or he might not. Charlie couldn't take the chance.

He had to assume Branson would notice right away, which meant Charlie only got one shot.

He levered himself to his feet, still crouching down, and picked up the table by two legs.

The very sturdy, very heavy wooden table, built to stack gear on, to take weight, not pretty but very strong. The boards nailed across the top of the table were an inch thick, and the legs were two-by-fours.

The equations for velocity and rigidity and force ran through Charlie's mind as he stood with the table legs in his hands, stood and stepped and swung in one motion. Branson started to turn just as Charlie hit him. The tabletop impacted his skull edge-on, with follow-through.

Charlie heard a wet, sickening crunch, and Branson went down.

He didn't stop moving, though, and Charlie hit him again, and again, and again.

By the time he stopped, the man's head was an unrecognizable mass of shining wet pulp.

Charlie stood there looking at it for long seconds, heard himself sobbing, felt himself hyperventilating, struggling for breath around a running nose and choked throat.

His hands hurt. He was still holding the gore-covered table up over his head. Something wet dropped onto his forehead.

He dropped the table, winced as it hit his back on its way down, stepped over what was left of Branson.

"Ian...."

Ian was bruised and bloody and limp. Blood still trickled out of his palm, hanging in the handcuff.

Charlie knelt down in front of him, touched his face, gently, with both of his dirty, bloody hands. "Ian? He's dead. It's over. Wake up, please? Tell me what to do now?"

Nothing.

Okay, Charlie could figure it out, had to figure it out. What next?

Ian was bleeding, that had to come first. Charlie pulled off the remains of his shirt, tore it in half down the back -- which was harder than it was in the movies and he had to use his teeth to get the tear started -- and used that to bandage Ian's hand. He folded one half into a pad and tied it on with the other half. His shirt was nowhere near clean, much less sanitary, but getting the bleeding stopped was the first priority. Infections could be handled later, in a hospital. Infections wouldn't matter if Ian bled out.

Ian made a few breathy little sounds while Charlie bandaged his hand. They tore at Charlie's heart, but he just told himself it meant Ian was alive, and at least sort of close to consciousness.

By the time he was done with Ian's hand, the immediate terror of the situation had backed off enough that the cuts on his face and his chest were a throbbing burn, and the cracked -- please cracked! -- ribs and arm and leg ached, flaring with every movement. He was covered in blood, but the knife had been sharp and nothing was gushing. He made sure he wasn't about to lose his intestines onto the floor -- the cuts were nowhere near as deep as they'd felt -- then gritted his teeth and pushed through the pain, because he didn't have time for it right then.

What next? He had to get Ian unchained. They had to get to help, get Ian to a hospital, or at least a doctor, a clinic, something, whatever they had way out there in the middle of nowhere, and that meant getting out of the shack.

Charlie clenched his jaw and went through Branson's pockets. It turned out the shock and stress of being constantly afraid of being murdered at any second had been useful. Without it, Charlie had to turn away and vomit twice more. By the last time, it was just dry heaves.

He didn't regret what he'd done, but it still made him sick to see the results. He tried not to look at the gory mess he'd made of a man's skull, but he couldn't really avoid it, so he let his stomach heave until it was empty and aching, then went back to his search.

After going through Branson's pants pockets, his shirt pocket, and his outside jacket pockets, after fumbling through all the keys on the keyring he'd found in a pants pocket, which had plenty of keys but none small enough to be a handcuff key, Charlie finally found the tiny key he was looking for tucked in an inside pocket of the leather jacket, on a thin, thumb-size ring all by itself.

His hands were shaking and it took him a ridiculously long time, but Charlie finally got Ian's wrists unlocked. They were bruised and swollen, and Ian's arms flopped down at his sides like dead things.

Now what? They needed help, but Charlie wasn't sure where to go. His cell phone didn't work with the tower down -- he checked to be sure, but there was no signal -- and he didn't remember whether Ian's house had a landline. It had to, didn't it? It was built way before cell phones, and his family would've had a phone line brought out. Although would Ian have kept it up, kept paying for it, when he had his cell?

There were neighbors, but Charlie didn't know exactly where. Or whether they'd be home. Houses were miles apart in that area, so it wasn't like he could just go knock on ten doors in five minutes, looking for someone who could help.

And he was afraid to leave Ian.

Charlie knelt down and put his hands on Ian's cheeks, lightly, and said, "Ian? Wake up. Please? Ian?"

Ian made a low noise, but didn't open his eyes.

"Ian? You've gotta wake up and help me. Please? What do I do? Ian, I need you...." Charlie pressed a kiss into Ian's hair, and felt sticky blood-splatter against his lips.

"Charlie?" It was barely a whisper.

"Yes, it's me. You need to wake up now. Can you do that for me?"

He sat back and saw Ian's eyes open, slowly, mostly. Ian tried to peer around, his head wobbly. "Branson?"

"He's dead," said Charlie. Then he swallowed and added, "I killed him," calm and direct, no stuttering or anything. He was pretty proud of himself for that. "You need help but I don't know where to go, and I don't want to leave you. What should I do?"

"What--?" Ian tried to shift, move his arms, but he winced and dropped them, into his lap that time. He just stared at his hands for a few moments, breathing, then looked up and said, "What happened?"

Charlie tried to say it, tried to figure out how to get the words out, but finally he just shifted a little to his left.

Ian spotted Branson right away. Charlie could see Ian's eyes moving, scanning up and down the corpse, returning to the destroyed head a few times. Then he looked up and said, "Wish you hadn't had to. Should've been me."

"You couldn't. It wasn't your fault. I was the only one who could, so I did. I know I had to. He'd have killed us both, I shouldn't feel guilty--"

"You're a good person," Ian said, interrupting his downward spiral of rambling. "You feel bad for killing him because you're a good person. That's different from feeling _guilty._ You did the right thing. Feeling bad about it being necessary is normal."

"Okay, fine." Charlie didn't want to talk about it anymore, didn't want to think about it. "Now what? You lost a lot of blood and our phones don't work and I don't think you can hike out of here, so what do I do?"

Ian looked down at his shirt, then at the blood pooled on the floor, dark and syrupy. He gritted his teeth and planted his good hand on the floor, tried to hoist himself to his feet.

"Hey, hey, no!" Charlie leaned on Ian's shoulders, holding him down on his ass where he belonged. Charlie figured he should probably be lying down, actually, but he wasn't about to press his luck. Ian stopped fighting him after a couple of seconds, closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the doorframe, looking dizzy.

"You're not going anywhere," said Charlie, sliding his hands across Ian's shoulders, down his arms and back up, trying to ignore the sticky, stiffening right sleeve. "You've lost a lot of blood, you need to relax, save your strength. Just tell me what to do."

"Okay, yeah," Ian said, his voice low and weak. "Fine." He looked around, as though looking for a magic door back to civilization, or a land line he'd forgotten about, or _something._ "Go outside and head east. That's left out the door. Past the stand of trees about half a mile away, there's a dirt access road that goes over the ridge to the east and eventually hits a paved road about eight miles out. Branson might've driven up here, and left a vehicle on that road. Check. Take his keys. If you find a vehicle, you can drive it right up to the door and we'll get me loaded in. That's the best-case scenario."

Charlie nodded. He hadn't thought of that -- just unconsciously assumed Branson would've hiked in from somewhere, like they had, but if there was road access, that made more sense.

"If you don't find a vehicle," Ian continued, "then come back and go down the trail we came up. Walk down to the road and hang a right. About a mile and a half, there's a gravel drive leading to the Lamberts' place. They might be home now, will definitely be home by sundown, so if no one's there, sit on the porch and wait. They should recognize you. Explain what happened, and come get me. They know how to get here." He paused, then said, "Call Don first. If we don't let your brother know what happened as soon as possible, he'll get pissy."

"Yeah, he will." Charlie made himself smile at that. He started to ask how the neighbors would recognize him, then remembered Ian telling him he'd sent Charlie's picture around. Okay, then.

"Are you good?" Ian asked. He reached up with his un-shot arm and gripped Charlie's wrist, his grasp light, weak. "You got beat up pretty bad. Are you going to be able to do this?"

"I have to," said Charlie. "You just sit here, relax. Try to sleep, maybe. Save your strength."

"I'll be fine. Just hurry. This is almost over."

Charlie leaned forward and slid his arms around Ian, very careful, not wanting to hurt either of them. "I love you. I'll be back."

Ian's eyes were closed, but he gave Charlie a sleepy, "I'll be waiting."

He would, Charlie knew. What was left was just logistics. That was usually Ian's thing, but Charlie would handle it.


	19. Chapter 19

**Ian**

The hospital in Phoenix smelled different from the one in LA. Any one in LA, actually; Ian was familiar with more LA hospitals than he'd ever wanted to experience.

He'd dozed off after Charlie left the first time. Charlie'd come back some unknown time later to check on Ian, waking him up with a light hand on his cheek. Told him he hadn't found Branson's vehicle after searching about a mile of road, that he was going to hike out to the Lamberts' place.

Charlie'd dug a blanket out of the chest, apologizing for forgetting to look earlier, then left him with a kiss and a promise to be back soon.

Ian had called -- all right, muttered, murmured, something without anywhere near as much volume as he'd intended -- for Charlie to remember to call Don, then drifted off again.

Next thing he knew, Bill Lambert and his son Stan were lifting him up, Charlie hovering to one side, his big brown eyes shining with worry. The Lamberts got him settled in the bed of their truck, bundled in more blankets from the chest, with Charlie next to him, still hovering. Ian was just as happy to have been unconscious for the bouncing, jolting trip across the meadow and down the access road.

An EMT shining a light in his eyes. A needle pushing into his arm, a cold feeling in his vein. An explosion of pain in his hand and he was out again.

Then he woke up again, aware of hospital smell, and the humming of flourescent lights and monitoring equipment. His hand was numb, and the rest of him felt detached, a dull ache that belonged to someone else.

"Ian?" A whispering voice. Charlie.

Ian tried to respond and managed a low, short "Hmm."

"You awake?" Familiar fingers, gentle across his forehead. "Go back to sleep."

"Slept enough," he muttered. He was pretty sure he had. He struggled to open his eyes. They were glued shut. When he tried to raise his hands to wipe them, his left hand stopped short with a jerking pinch, and his right hand wouldn't move at all.

"Hey, stop, you're okay, stay still. What do you need?"

"Sleep crud in my eyes," he muttered, then coughed. His throat was sore.

Why not? Made sense that it'd match everything else.

He heard a low laugh, then, "Fine, relax, stay still." A few moments later, a damp... tissue? something like that, wiped lightly across one eye a couple of times, then the other.

Ian opened his still-gummy eyes, squinted against the glare, which was only the lights spilling into the room from the hallway, since the room lights were off, then blinked a few times.

"Charlie?"

"Yeah."

"How are you? You were hurt... how bad?"

"Just some cuts and cracks and bruises. I'll be fine."

"Broken rib," said another voice. "Concussion. Sprained wrist. Very badly twisted ankle, which he walked about ten miles on--"

"Three miles, max," protested Charlie.

"So it wasn't over a mile up that road and back before you even set out for the neighbors...?"

"All right, five miles. Less than five, really. I was fine."

Ian peered into the darkness and saw someone sitting in a corner, next to some kind of counter, behind Charlie. Don. Of course.

"How long?" Ian asked. He thought about trying to sit up, then figured it'd be stupid and wouldn't work anyway.

"Since the shack?" asked Charlie. "About...." He looked at his watch. "About twenty hours. Almost twenty-one. Since your surgery finished up, about eleven."

"What?" Surgery. Well, yeah, of course. He made a cautious attempt to squeeze his right hand, just a little -- stupidly proud of himself for being able to remember right away exactly what the worst injury was -- but his hand was still numb at least to the elbow. "How'd it go?"

"They wouldn't say," said Charlie, a thread of annoyance in his voice. "We're not family, they wouldn't tell us."

Don stood up. "I'll let the nurse know you're awake," he said. "The doctor can tell you, and you can tell Charlie, make him stop worrying."

Charlie glared up at Don, but didn't contradict his brother, who just smirked at him and sauntered out.

Ian watched him go, through an open doorway that didn't have a door. There was a flimsy looking curtain hanging from a thin cord, the whole thing shoved to one side. There was some kind of poster he couldn't read in the dark tacked up next to the doorway on the right, near the empty chair Don had been sitting in. The cabinet had cupboards above and drawers below, with a few boxes and jars lined up at the back, and a sink on the end near the head of the bed.

Ian didn't have the energy to turn his head and look on the other side of the room. He was tired, and his eyes were already aimed at Charlie. He'd rather look at Charlie than anything else.

Charlie looked tired, and dishevelled. His hair was tangled, his cheek was bandaged from eye to jaw, and he was wearing a shirt Ian didn't recognize.

"Mooching shirts from the hospital lost-and-found again?" he asked, managing half a grin.

Charlie looked down, and Ian was pretty sure he was blushing. "Not my fault," he muttered. "I'll have to donate some clothes after I get home. To the hospitals that've given me stuff to wear when I come in naked or bloody."

Ian winced at the memory. "Let's promise each other something," he said.

"What?"

"Once I get out of here, neither of us sets foot in a hospital for at least a year." He was really sick of this whole getting injured thing, and especially didn't want to see Charlie hurt again in the near future. Or ever, if he had anything to say about it.

"I'm... pretty sure that won't work," said Charlie, looking down for a moment, then meeting Ian's gaze. "The doctor wouldn't tell us anything, but... your hand. It was pretty... the bullet went all the way through, and it made a mess. I think you're going to need therapy at least."

At least. Yeah, Ian hadn't really thought that through.

He'd be lucky if it was only therapy, actually. Thinking about all the tiny bones and muscles and tendons in a hand, he'd be shocked if he only needed one surgery.

...

Fuck.

His hand.

His right hand.

Fuck.

He hadn't thought about it before, and how the hell could he have _not_ thought about it before, but Branson had known exactly what he was doing when he shot a hole through Ian's hand. His right hand.

He hadn't intended for Ian to live more than a few hours, but he had to have known, had to have planned for it. The fucker had planned everything else, had planned everything to the last detail, had anticipated everything Ian would do, foreseen every step along the way. He had to have known that even if Ian escaped somehow, even if he got away, his life was over as soon as Branson destroyed his hand.

"Ian? Ian, breathe for me. You in there? I'm going to start yelling in five seconds if--"

Ian grabbed Charlie's hand where it was brushing across his forehead, ignoring the pinching pain in his wrist. He squeezed until he saw Charlie wince, then jerked his hand away and let his head fall back against the pillow.

His whole body was tense and everything ached, and he hadn't even noticed, hadn't noticed Charlie talking to him, trying to get his attention, he'd just zoned out, and what did it matter anyway?

"Ian? Come on, talk to me. What's wrong? You hurting? I can go get someone, we can get you some more of the good drugs, we can learn tie-dying together."

"No, I'm fine." Ian finally managed to say something, but what came out was bullshit, he _wasn't_ fine. He could probably use some pain juice, but that was the least of his problems.

"Ian, you're _not_ fine. I can tell. What's going on? Talk to me." 

Charlie was leaning over the side of the hospital bed, looking like he was trying to figure out how to crawl in with him, but the barriers were up and all he could manage was hanging over like someone bending over the side of a sheep pen. 

Ian stared down at his right arm, lying like a dead thing on top of the blanket. He tried to move it again, and the most he could manage was to get his shoulder to twitch. Everything below his shoulder was dead, and he was hoping it was the drugs but he was terrified that it wasn't, that something had happened with his nerves, maybe the injury plus having his hand cuffed over his head, maybe he'd injured the nerves up in his shoulder and it just took a while for it to manifest, and even if not, his _hand_ was mangled, he'd had the shit blown out of his hand and even if his arm worked what good was it without a hand? It'd be like having a prosthetic, except prosthetics were designed to be useful and he just had this big wad of dead flesh hanging off his arm, which might also be dead.... 

Someone in scrubs came striding into the room, Charlie scurrying behind. Ian hadn't even noticed him leaving. 

The stranger was talking to him, but Ian didn't care what they were saying. Or who they were. He ignored them until finally the world faded away. 

***

There weren't any windows in the room, and his watch had vanished somewhere, so when Ian woke up, he had no idea what time it was.

The lights were low, and the room was quiet. He was facing the other way and saw, to his surprise, that the room was bigger than he'd thought. There was another bed on the other side, with someone sleeping in it. Or unconscious, maybe. It was a hospital, after all.

He turned his head and saw an empty plastic chair pushed back against the counter.

Ian closed his eyes and tried not to think. Just burrowing into the back of his own brain and staying there for a while -- maybe a few years? -- sounded like a great idea, and he knew Charlie wouldn't let him do that if he were around. So maybe it was just as well he wasn't.

He knew he should be trying to figure out what he was going to do, what his life was going to look like now, but it seemed like a lot of work, and besides, what was there?

If anyone offered to teach him some arts-and-crafts shit he could do with one hand, Ian was going to strangle them with the one he had left.

He tilted his head up and looked down in the direction of his right hand. It was still lying there on top of the blanket, a still white lump covered in bandages. He found, with a gasp of pain, that he could move his arm, most of his arm. Making his elbow bend took a lot of concentration, but he managed to get his hand up onto his stomach. It had some kind of a drain in it, with a tube vanishing over the side of the bed.

Moving his hand didn't work at all. It's like it wasn't there. He was looking at it, but his brain couldn't find it.

He let his head flop back onto the pillow and closed his eyes.

It was just the drugs. His hand was so torn up, they had to have him on serious drugs. Not being able to feel his hand right then was a _good_ thing. He'd be screaming his head off if he could feel it, and that'd be damned embarrassing.

And he didn't really know what the prognosis was. Maybe he was going to be okay? A couple surgeries, some therapy -- physical therapy always sucked, but it did the job. He'd been injured before and always snapped back. He'd caught a few bullets in his day. Okay, nothing like getting a hole blown through a hand, but the hole in his triceps had smarted, and the one in his belly'd knocked him on his ass for months. He hadn't known whether he'd ever be cleared for the field, and it'd seemed like forever that he was stuck at home, barely cleared to walk to the john by himself.

Who knew what shape he was in? He hadn't even talked to a doctor yet.

Thinking about it, it was kind of embarrassing that he'd zoned out like that, in front of Charlie. Don had been around too, which sucked large.

Ian peered around and spotted a big, white cable hanging across one corner of the bed, near his head, and dangling off the side. It was on the side with his bad hand, of course, and his other hand had an IV needle stuck in it, so it took some careful maneuvering but he finally grabbed the cable and hauled in the control box for the lights, the TV, and the nurse call button.

He pressed the call button, then dropped the control and waited.

He'd counted all the ceiling tiles -- one hundred and sixty-two -- and was peering down at the squares in the linoleum by the time an older woman in scrubs came in and said, "What can I do for you, Mr. Edgerton?" in a low voice that wasn't quite a whisper.

"Can I talk to someone about my condition?" he asked, keeping his voice low too. Probably for the guy in the other bed. "I haven't actually talked to a doctor yet. Been unconscious and freaked out and all that." He normally wouldn't want to admit that to anyone, but it was true, and lying to the medics was usually a bad idea. Besides, she probably knew about... whatever that'd been that'd happened last time he woke up.

To be fair, it wasn't really a freak-out. He hadn't been screaming or anything. Or at least, he didn't think he had. Was pretty sure he hadn't. Far as he could remember, he'd just sort of panicked and zoned out. Whatever it was, it was kinda normal. He hoped it didn't happen again, although whenever he thought about his hand....

"It's three in the morning, Mr. Edgerton. There's a doctor on duty on the floor, but she's not the physician assigned specifically to your case. She could come speak with you if you want to, but you'll get better information from Dr. Riker in a few hours."

Ian waved his watchless, needle-stuck left wrist, careful of the IV line, and said, "Sorry, no idea what time it is. I guess I'll wait." He paused, then glanced at the empty chair and added, "I have any visitors hovering around?" He'd been kind of surprised Charlie wasn't with him when he woke up. He was glad Charlie was home -- or at least, at a hotel somewhere -- getting some sleep, assuming he was, but it was just... surprising.

"We don't allow visitors outside of posted hours," the nurse said. "We occasionally make exceptions for someone who's dying, but you're not. Which is a good thing." She smiled at him, and he had to give her half a smirk back. Yeah, fine, that was good news.

"What you need most right now is rest," she said. "If I can't get you something...?"

Ian said, "Some water would be good." He wasn't really thirsty -- which seemed wierd, considering how long it'd been since he'd drunk anything, but the IV was probably taking care of that -- but it seemed sort of rude to send her away without asking for something concrete, like he'd wasted her time.

She nodded and got a plastic cup out of one of the cupboards, tore the plastic wrapping off, and filled it at the sink. She pressed the control to raise the head of his bed so he was sort of mostly sitting up, then handed him the cup.

"Thanks." He took a drink, more to be polite than anything else.

"Do you want me to leave the bed up, or put it back down so you can sleep?"

"Leave it up," he said. "Maybe a little more? Got any magazines?" There was no way he was going to sleep any more, and he was afraid that trying, with no distractions, would end up with him focusing on his hand again. He didn't really want to dive back into that particular sucking sinkhole.

"I'll see what I can find," she said with a bland smile. She raised the bed a bit more, then rolled the tiny bedside table over within his reach and left.

Ian put his water down, lay back and stared at the ceiling.

His hand was still lying there, white-wrapped and still, like a package, a _thing_ someone had dropped off next to him. Maybe there was a stack of letters and junk mail under it. It didn't seem like part of him, like some alien was consuming his arm a bite at a time....

Ian forced his mind away from it. He closed his eyes and imagined his SR-25. He disassembled it in his mind, laid out all the parts, started mentally cleaning it.

In his imagination he still had two working hands. He tried to relax and went with it.


	20. Chapter 20

A familiar curly head poked in through the door on the dot of ten in the morning. Ian raised his good hand off the bed for a wave, and Charlie came bouncing in. His smile was big and bright, but Ian saw the stress lines around his eyes above the white bandages.

"Ian! How are you feeling? Stupid question, but better at least?" Charlie dragged the chair back over to the bed, but didn't sit. He leaned over the side of the bed and rested one hand on Ian's shoulder -- carefully, not putting any weight on it, just touching -- while the other curled around Ian's cheek and tugged gently, turning his face into a kiss.

Having Charlie close, being able to feel him, relax into his scent, into the young-happy-loving aura he gave off just by being himself, let Ian relax and feel more normal than he had since before everything went to shit.

He just lay there and let Charlie be in control. With one hand useless (don't think about that) and the other pinned with an IV needle, being more active would result in a lot more pain and fuss than Ian was ready to deal with.

That was okay. Having Charlie there kissing him made it okay, let the panicky part of his brain that wanted to go burn down the world to make it pay for what'd been done to him shut up for a while. Or at least let Ian ignore it.

Ian let himself drown in Charlie-Charlie-Charlie for however long it was, until a sardonic voice said, "Do you two need a chaperone?"

He was about to tell Eppes where to go and what to do when he got there, when a voice he didn't know said, "Seriously, damn fags should keep it to themselves, especially when their audience can't leave even if he wants to."

Charlie straightened up and stared across Ian at the other bed, and the room went silent. Don scowled and took a couple of steps into the room.

"I was joking," he said. "I'm allowed to joke, because the mobile one is my baby brother, and it's my job to needle him. _You_ are a stranger, and you can keep your bigoted crap to yourself."

Don's jacket was hanging open, and Ian was pretty sure the asshole in the other bed could see his weapon, if he was paying attention. Either he wasn't, or he knew that no one sane was likely to shoot a guy in a hospital bed unless he was shot at first, because he just said, _"My_ crap? What about _their_ crap? I'm stuck here, in case you hadn't noticed. I'm not a bigot, I don't give a damn what they get up to in their own bedroom, but they're in _my_ bedroom here and I don't wanna see it."

Don took another step closer to the asshole, his whole posture radiating "pissed" even from what Ian could see behind him, and said, "What if my brother were a woman?"

"Hey!"

Don ignored Charlie and went on, "and she came in to see her boyfriend in the hospital after he'd been beaten up and shot by a psycho, and kissed him. Would you be griping about it then?"

"That's different," said the asshole, because they all said that.

"It's not even the tiniest bit different," said Don, his voice lower. "If you don't want to see my brother kissing his boyfriend, then don't look. I'll get you a magazine."

"He can have mine," said Ian. A grab and a flick with his left hand, which luckily didn't have to move much to pull off the maneuver, and a shiny-slick copy of _Us_ went sailing through the air, spinning like a Frisbee but a lot faster, and thwapped the asshole in the face. The asshole yelped and Ian called, "Sorry! Off hand."

The guy started griping and cussing again. Ian ignored him and reached for Charlie. "Ignore him. Doesn't matter what assholes think."

Charlie grinned down at him and went back to kissing him.

Ian was half aware of a nurse coming in, some raised voices, then some lowered voices. A looming presence hovered next to the bed for a few moments, then Eppes said, "Well, I guess I'll go take a walk or something," and left.

The nurse left a bit later, and the asshole kept his mouth shut.

Charlie came up for breath eventually and rested his forehead against Ian's.

"I was scared," he whispered.

"Me too," Ian whispered back. "Thought it was over. You were great."

He felt Charlie start trembling. "I beat a man's brains in."

"You saved my life," said Ian, keeping his voice low but making it intense. He slid a hand up to cup Charlie's jaw and made him raise up just a little, look at him. "You saved my life," he repeated. "And your own. It was him or us. You know that."

"I do. It doesn't help."

"That's because you're a good person. Taking a life hurts you, no matter how justified. That pain means you're _not_ a killer or a murderer or whatever it is you've got bouncing around in your brain. You're a good person who was forced to do a terrible thing. I wish I could've been the one to do it, but I couldn't. You had to, and you did, and we're alive because of it." He paused, then asked, "Do you regret that?"

"No!" Charlie shook his head, hard, then lowered his voice again and said, "No, I'd do the same thing again if I had to. I just wish I hadn't had to."

"So do I."

Ian tugged Charlie's head down again, so his forehead rested on Ian's chest. It was awkward -- Charlie was bent over, practically hanging over the side of the bed, but he didn't seem to mind right then.

Ian just lay there, running his good hand through Charlie's tangled hair, careful of the IV line. What he'd said to Charlie, what he'd asked, echoed in his mind and he realized it applied to him too.

If losing his hand was the price of coming out of all that shit alive, did he regret that? Would he rather have died?

If those were the only choices, if that was the only way it could've gone, and it seemed like it was, then did he wish it'd gone the other way?

He ran his left hand through Charlie's hair again, closed his eyes and felt the weight of Charlie against him, the warmth, the scent of him.

No. He didn't regret it.

It still sucked, but it was better than being dead. Better than not having _this._

And maybe his hand would be okay. He'd talked to a doctor, who didn't know and who'd been straight with him, telling him they'd do their best but they'd just have to see how it turned out.

So long as he had Charlie, Ian was pretty sure it'd manage to turn out pretty well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The End of part two. :) Thanks for reading along with me, and thanks for everyone who left kudos and/or comments. You're all awesome, seriously.
> 
> Part three is in the works, although I only have a few thousand words, so it's going to be a while. As usual, I won't start posting until I'm done.


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